The boundaries between domestic and urban environments are increasingly blurred. Until the contemporary era, the house acted as aquite autonomous microcosm and the city as its receptacle, but today this distinction is not so sharp. Various changes are transforming both domestic and urban life. Many activities, events and rituals usually associated with domestic space today take place often outside, scattering the home throughout the city. Meanwhile, domestic environment is increasingly accommodating some urban functions, changing its traditional meaning and giving rise to hybrid situations. Domestic and urban environments are merging in asymbiotic way; it is then necessary to rethink their spaces in order to respond to their contemporary and future evolutions. The paper aims at introducing the main facts about the contemporary blurring of the boundaries of domestic and urban space, explaining how this is currently affecting the architecture of both the house and the city.

The social and technological revolutions, combined with the recent crises, have again brought attention to the housing issue in the main western urban environments. More and more people are moving to cities, reopening the architectural debate of the Existenzminimum and the Minimum Living Cell to cope with an ever-increasing demand and ever-less available space combined with the desire to provide decent housing solutions for emergent lifestyles. A contemporary living cell that, after the second wave of the feminist movement and digital technologies, often coincides with the bedroom and that is supported by a plethora of shared domestic uses on a more urban scale. It is an emerging and often informal domesticity that has the potential to influence the architecture and perception of the house. It does not necessarily imply that the houses should be smaller or that the bedrooms bigger, but that new domestic hierarchies are emerging and shaping spatial relations and necessities.

In recent years, architectural interactions have become the center of many important reflections. However, there is little agreement on the subject. Some authors consider architecture to be about its relations with human and nonhuman agents. Others consider that buildings have an autonomous presence, which transcends all their interactions. These approaches are generally seen as incompatible. Although at the heart of the debate is the role of relations in architecture, their nature is not addressed. The discussion could gain clarity by recognizing the differences between them. In this paper, we propose a classification of architectural interactions, which may help to better inform further discussion on the topic. A closer look at architectural relations reveals that autonomy and relationality are not opposing, but complementary, aspects.

The dwelling always held work activities. However, with the emergence of capital, work spread more and more in the city, abandoning the dwelling due to new dynamics of mass production and accumulation that were no longer suited to the small scale of the house. It resulted in a gradual rethinking of domestic spaces, leading to the definition of the established duality of home/work. Instead, the digital revolution and the advent of capital’s ‘immaterial work’ in western countries placed the domestic space as the potential epicentre of capitalist production. Immaterial work is not bound by spatial constraints and can therefore be carried out anywhere, even and especially at home. The insertion of production dynamics within the domestic sphere is generating numerous spatial-temporal conflicts of traditional places and functions, leading to new everyday life and new spatial needs. The paper therefore analyses the changing dynamics of the home and its spatial possibilities emerging from the potential merge of immaterial productivity with domesticity.