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It is widely recognised that the UK housing market is dysfunctional. The problems are not limited to affordability and the mismatch between supply and demand. Equally important are the kinds of new housing produced by the speculative volume building model, and the communities and neighbourhoods that result. In the real world, the quantity, quality, location, density and price of housing are intimately bound up with how people live and relate to their neighbours and the resources that their homes consume. Cohousing could play a key role in solving the crisis. Cohousing usually includes private individual or family homes, which may be owned or rented, clustered around spaces and facilities that are collectively used. Food is often a focus, with community food production and/or a common house for shared meals. The communities generally have non-hierarchical structures and decision-making processes, and are usually designed, planned and managed by the residents. Our recent ESRC action research programme2 focused on cohousing in the UK today: what works, what are the barriers to wider adoption, and what questions still need to be answered? Over the course of a two-year series of seminars and site visits our group met together with cohousing practitioners, activists and other academics from the UK and abroad.

This article calls for cross-disciplinary scrutiny of the costs of time squeeze – beyond current preoccupation with time allocation and the organization of employment. Discussion turns to an integrated, materially embedded infrastructure of everyday life, drawing on vignettes from in-depth biographies with London working families to put the time-squeeze into material context. Reference is made to generic decision ‘dilemmas’ commonly experienced across the sample: housing affordability, childcare shortage, transport failure and school choice. These illustrate the co-constitutive nature of urban inequalities and city time.

This paper explores the extensification of work—that is the distribution or exporting of work across different spaces/scales and times—and its impact on individual workers and households. We argue that contracting out and the work life balance debates might be developed more usefully within the holistic framework of extensification. The key process that we follow can be described as overflowing. We contrast the universally positive representations of spillovers and embedding that we are familiar with in economic geographies with the more negatively characterised overflowing of work into and out of the household. The paper is built around a case study of those involved in the new media industry in San Francisco: households, workers and companies.