How financialisation-led densification is spurring inner-city studentification?

Sometimes, there is a false impression of permanence despite ongoing neighbourhood changes. It has been happening recently in Lodz, Poland, where ‘rooming flats’ are mushrooming in the inner city. However, they remain ‘hidden’ from the public behind facades.

Today, numerous cities are home to higher education students. They are increasingly living off-campus in private housing and, as a result, many urban neighbourhoods experience studentification. In our paper, we present how studentification is progressing in the inner city of Lodz through the expansion of the rooming-flats business.

We empirically illustrate rooming flats in Lodz: their materialities, geographies, labelling, production, and paradoxical impacts. This way, we show that rooming flats are accommodations delivered usually through a profit-seeking conversion of conventional spacious flats in historic buildings into shared housing with multiple single-occupancy bedrooms for student rentals.

However, we go beyond that and demonstrate that studentification in inner-city Lodz is being spurred by financialisation-led densification. More precisely, we show that the soft-densification activities of real estate actors serve as a bridge between housing financialisation and vertical studentification. Revealing and interpreting the interplay of financialisation, densification and studentification is our main contribution to the current, vivid debates on the nexus of student housing and urban geographies.

What is more, we argue that the phenomenon of rooming flats should not be seen just within the context of Lodz. Instead, we propose adding the term rooming flats to the expanding lexicon of shared housing forms, such as HMOs, PBSAs, and co-livings, which have recently proliferated in cities worldwide. All these new housing forms demonstrate that real estate activities can quickly transform urban neighbourhoods and living densities.

Consequently, we perceive the new era of ‘shrinking homes’ as requiring critical involvement from scholars and policymakers to better understand the mechanisms and effects of densification. As a step in this direction, our paper contributes to the special issue of Urban Studies, ‘The Business of Densification: Institutions, Actors, and Outcomes in the Transformation of Urban Settlements’.