A multidisciplinary yet incomplete field of research

Although living alone has always been a feature of urban life, the phenomenon has received surprisingly little attention from urban historians. In their edited volume on single life in early modern Europe, Ariadne Schmidt, Isabelle Devos and Bruno Blondé even suggest that ‘historians have struggled to explain the very existence of single people’.Footnote ⁵ There are, however, notable exceptions across all periods, ranging from singletons in the Roman world to bachelor life in American cities at the turn of the twentieth century and their more recent counterparts – the much-loathed Young Urban Professionals (yuppies) of the 1980s.Footnote ⁶ Recent scholarship has primarily focused on lodgers in relation to early modern and nineteenth-century housing and labour markets.Footnote ⁷ At the same time, urban historians have offered valuable insights into nineteenth- and twentieth-century European cities as spaces of individuality, though often without explicitly addressing one-person households.Footnote ⁸ This limited attention seems to result from the dominance of the nuclear family in modern historiography, the transient and marginalized nature of one-person households, (urban) historians’ predisposition towards examining cities as collective spaces, the scattered nature of relevant primary sources and methodological challenges in defining households in the pre-modern period.

Responding to this historiographical gap, Keith Snell situates the recent rise of one-person households in Europe, North America and Japan within a broader historical framework. Based on census data going back to the early modern period and a systematic literature review, he concludes that ‘the fuller causes and effects of the growth of “solitaries”’ demand extensive attention from historians.Footnote ⁹ Snell’s call for further research echoes Richard Wall’s observation – some 30 years earlier – that ‘a great deal of the increase in one-person households still remains to be explained’.Footnote ¹⁰

Wall’s work was part of a wave of demographic studies analysing the growing number of one-person households across various European countries during the second half of the twentieth century, primarily using administrative and census data at national and aggregated levels.Footnote ¹¹ Academic debate was stimulated by the introduction of the ‘Second Demographic Transition’ by Ron Lesthaeghe and Dirk van de Kaa, which provided a theoretical framework for changes in demographic patterns first observed in the Western world from the 1970s onwards – most notably sustained sub-replacement fertility, the growth of alternative living arrangements and a non-stationary, ageing population.Footnote ¹² Further explanations include individualism, delayed marriage, rising divorce rates, improved health and financial conditions among the elderly and excess male mortality. Although these studies all provide compelling evidence of the growth in one-person households and offer tentative explanations – mostly at the national level – much less is known about the consequences of this quintessentially urban phenomenon.

Sociologists have also explored the topic, specifically in relation to current individualization patterns and living arrangements in Anglophone societies and, more recently, Japan and Sweden.Footnote ¹³ Living alone has also been examined with regard to identity, community and consumption, albeit without a historical dimension.Footnote ¹⁴ In the field of geography, Ray Hall and Philip Ogden were the first to examine the relationship between the growing number of one-person households, residential mobility and job and housing markets in late twentieth-century London and Paris,Footnote ¹⁵ while acknowledging that ‘[the] census of course cannot show the full diversity of ways in which groups of individuals organize their lives’.Footnote ¹⁶ They therefore argued for a more explicit linking of the composition of urban populations, household structures, lifecycles, societal transformations, urban economies and housing markets when investigating the rise of one-person households.

These studies provide useful points of departure for further research. They demonstrate the importance of quantitative sources for measuring the number of one-person households, the value of comparative approaches for identifying differences and similarities between national and urban contexts and the need for clear theoretical vantage points when investigating this watershed moment in the history of urban societies.

A promising research agenda for urban historians

Overseeing the different academic fields that have partially probed the topic, it becomes clear that a comprehensive urban-historical perspective remains lacking. Urban historians are particularly well positioned to investigate the rising number of people living alone during the second half of the twentieth century. This aligns with Charles Tilly’s seminal suggestion that urban historians should take on ‘big questions’, connect large social processes to everyday life and take time and place seriously.Footnote ¹⁷ More recently, Shane Ewen has contended that urban history ‘done well’ is grounded in comparison, combines concepts from the social sciences with empirical research and engages with contemporary concerns about urban societies.Footnote ¹⁸ Because the ongoing demographic shift towards solo living occurred simultaneously across multiple European cities – and because social scientists have examined this mainly in limited historical scope and with few qualitative sources – the rise of one-person households constitutes an ideal research topic for urban historians. Its comparative dimension is especially promising. In the broadest sense, comparing cities over time can highlight similarities and differences and can help explain both historical continuities and change.Footnote ¹⁹ As Nicolas Kenny and Rebecca Madgin state, ‘[p]ursuing the relational aspect of urban history in a comparative and transnational perspective […] broadens the examination of the fundamental relationships that guide how we have historically organized and lived in our cities’.Footnote ²⁰

What could an investigation of the rise of one-person households look like? As a working definition, we adopt Eurostat’s broad and widely used understanding of one-person households as ‘those where a person lives alone in an individual, separate housing unit; they also include units where a single person lives independently, as a lodger, in a separate room (or rooms) in the same housing unit as other occupant(s)’.Footnote ²¹ This is, of course, a reality produced by census takers and population registers. Urban historians will recognize that household definitions are not static but vary across national and even local contexts, which should therefore be part of our investigation.

Although people have lived alone throughout history, albeit in smaller numbers and under different circumstances, demographic evidence affirms that the most pronounced increase occurred from the 1960s onwards and has accelerated since, particularly in the cities of northwestern Europe. Focusing on this time and place, a comparative case study approach allows us to investigate the phenomenon’s temporalities and contingencies. It is therefore logical to select case studies with a large and growing share of one-person households during this period, when cities experienced comparable trajectories of demographic change driven by suburbanization, postcolonial and labour migration and deindustrialization alongside the rise of the service economy. Let us consider Amsterdam, discussed in more detail below, Stockholm and London as case studies for now. It is estimated that in 1960 in Amsterdam and London 5–10 per cent and in Stockholm 20–25 per cent of the urban population lived alone, rising to 35–50 per cent for all cases in 2000. It has been argued that the post-war welfare states to which these cities belonged facilitated the rise of one-person households through progressive policy-making,Footnote ²² raising the question whether this was also the case at the urban level. An investigation of these case studies could lay the groundwork for future research on the more recent rise of one-person households in other parts of the world. For example, it would be relevant to contrast these welfare state cities to case studies in a communist context, where the state supposedly had an even stronger influence on household formation.

While we have some tentative explanations for why the number of one-person households grew so rapidly during the second half of the twentieth century, we know comparatively little about the consequences. I identify three key effects: a radical shift in how people understood social relations and themselves, a transformation of housing politics and a reconfiguration of urban space and its lived experience.

With regard to the first consequence: thanks to censuses and population registries we already know that during the second half of the twentieth century most one-person households clustered in the 20–35 and 65+ age groups. The question remains to what extent class, ethnicity and gender might have affected the propensity to live alone.Footnote ²³ In line with the Second Demographic Transition, populations in northwestern European cities became increasingly asymmetrical in the second half of the twentieth century, with students, young urban professionals, migrant workers and elderly people gradually replacing family households. While for some living alone was the unwanted outcome of the globalization of labour markets, divorce or bereavement, leading to marginalization and loneliness, for others it meant freeing oneself from restraining family bonds and becoming an autonomous individual, thus enhancing personal wellbeing and social mobility. With regard to the second consequence: the growing number of one-person households forced policy-makers to reconsider the housing question. Finally, in relation to the third consequence: the phenomenon also led to the introduction of new housing typologies and the further development of already-existing typologies, including both living arrangements that strove towards new modes of sociability between individuals in separate living quarters and those that accommodated an exclusively solitary lifestyle.Footnote ²⁴ We can assume that growing numbers of people living alone manifested itself in changing daily urban rhythms and social spaces.

The source materials for investigating this structural societal transformation are full of potential. We can discern three main bodies: qualitative archival sources, digitized newspapers and magazines and demographic data. First, there is a wide array of written and visual sources produced by national and local governments, NGOs, housing corporations, property developers, grassroots organizations, social scientists, architects and planners. These materials include municipal surveys, policy reports, social surveys, minutes of political meetings, planning documents, architectural drawings and floorplans of, for example, communes, dormitories, co-living spaces, lofts, studios and micro-apartments. They enable us to trace crucial moments in policy- and decision-making processes, to expose the dynamics between different stakeholders and offer insights into how contemporaries understood, experienced, designed and planned for the rise of one-person households. In particular, the materials generated by social sciences and design professions, which blossomed during the period under study, constitute a wealth of un(der)examined information on social context and spatial interventions.Footnote ²⁵ Secondly, newspapers and magazines might reveal popular opinions and attitudes towards one-person households. Their recent digitization allows us to identify patterns and sentiments through long-distance reading. Thirdly, for each case study digitized statistical yearbooks are available. These data can be linked to administrative registry entries, geo-information and variables such as household income, segregation, average dwelling size, year of construction and ownership that enable us to analyse the relationship between who were living alone, where and how.

Taken together, these sources can reveal the motives and experiences of one-person households and the social groups to which they belonged, the spaces in which they lived and, finally, their evolution, prevalence and spatial distribution at urban and even neighbourhood levels.

Changing household structures and housing policies in 1970s Amsterdam

During the second half of the twentieth century, especially from the 1960s onwards, Amsterdam underwent rapid and far-reaching population change. In combination with urban redevelopment, the advent of mass car ownership and the construction of new towns within commuting distance of the city set off a massive wave of suburbanization, with mostly middle-class families fleeing the inner-city areas. Their place was taken by an increasingly diverse urban population, often living in non-family arrangements, including students, migrant workers and postcolonial migrants. Changing norms and values regarding marriage and family formation meant that young people increasingly chose to live alone or together without children, while increasing life expectancies meant more and more elderly people lived alone as well – either out of choice or necessity. As a result, an asymmetrical and increasingly floating urban population began to emerge, especially in the former working-class districts surrounding the city’s historic core.Footnote ²⁶

The question arose as to whether the city should entice the families who were leaving such areas to stay by building family homes and gearing urban renewal to their needs and wishes, as advocated by the local planning department, or whether it should prioritize the growing number of one- and two-person households, as advocated by the city’s housing department and local housing corporations. A 1972 municipal report on housing distribution observed that Amsterdam needed to brace itself for persistent housing shortages in any case:

In 1975, the national government – then led by a progressive coalition spearheaded by the Dutch Labour Party – published a memorandum in which it promised to alleviate the housing shortages among one- and two-person households (see Figure 2). This diverse group of individuals and childless couples, including ‘elderly residents, homosexuals, guest workers and [postcolonial migrants], studying and working youth’, would not be able to achieve self-actualization without a decent roof over their heads. According to the state secretary, it was time for structural government intervention.Footnote ²⁸ The need for small housing units was significant: the State Commission on Population Issues estimated that the national shortage of 400,000 homes was largely attributable to singles and cohabiting couples.Footnote ²⁹ In addition to newbuilds, the state secretary proposed to reserve family homes for singles and two-person households, to split larger homes and to make vacant commercial and government buildings available for residential use. The main subsidy condition for municipalities and housing corporations wishing to construct these smaller housing units – dubbed Huisvesting Alleenstaanden en Tweepersoonshuishoudens (HAT) – was a modest implementation and thus a low rental price.

Figure 2.

Front page of the national memorandum on housing solitaries and two-person households, Huisvesting Alleenstaanden en Tweepersoonshuishoudens (1975).

As in other Dutch conurbations confronted with housing shortages among non-family households, a steering group was established in Amsterdam to advise city officials and housing professionals. Whereas housing policies of the 1950s and 1960s were primarily directed towards family households, in both renewal and expansion areas, during the second half of the 1970s the steering group recommended a drastic change of course. In urban renewal neighbourhoods, 80 per cent of dwellings were to be (re)constructed as small apartments across five residential floors, with younger people occupying the uppermost levels. Furthermore, during renovations, the merging of housing units would become prohibited. Policy-makers were advised to give less weight to the needs of families in their overall planning.Footnote ³⁰ This was confirmed in 1978 when the steering committee made an estimate of the proportion of one- and two-person households among housing seekers in Amsterdam. No fewer than 30,000 singles and couples without children were looking for a suitable (or more suitable) home. This growing group was estimated to make up 70 per cent of the urban population and, as expected, lived mainly in the pre-war neighbourhoods (see Figures 3, 4 and 5). According to the steering committee, they would determine the future of Amsterdam and should therefore be given priority in the construction of new (and smaller) housing units:

Figure 3.

Families (blue line) and solitaries (green line), 1974–2004, in absolute numbers. Source: Tim Verlaan, ‘De compacte stad van Michael van der Vlis (1970–90)’, Onderzoek en Statistiek, 29 Apr. 2025, https://onderzoek.amsterdam.nl/artikel/de-compacte-stad, accessed 24 Mar. 2026.

Figure 4.

Solitaries (percentage of total population) for Amsterdam’s different neighbourhoods in 1975. Source: Verlaan, ‘De compacte stad’.

Figure 5.

Solitaries (percentage of total population) for Amsterdam’s different neighbourhoods in 1986. Source: Verlaan, ‘De compacte stad’.

In response to these conclusions, the housing department suggested converting family homes into youth units, with an additional 15 per cent of small homes on all new construction projects and filling all open gaps in the older city’s street facades – the result of haphazard demolition works, urban decay and stalled redevelopment schemes – with HAT units.Footnote ³² The planning department, by contrast, proposed that at least 50 per cent of the housing stock in Amsterdam’s urban renewal neighbourhoods include four-room-or-larger units to support family expansion for young people who preferred central living to suburbia. In their family-oriented thinking, the planners were afraid the city’s economic base would further erode, with even more male breadwinners leaving the city, while urban amenities catering to families would continue to suffer. The housing corporations, which were ultimately responsible for putting a roof over the heads of housing seekers, however sided with the city’s housing department. They considered the influx of young singles and outflow of families as established facts: the suburbs were not an alternative for one-person households as they were ‘too expensive, too far, and too uninviting’, while the urban environment of the 1970s was otherwise unattractive for affluent families. According to the corporations’ spokesperson, the ‘spatial emancipation of young people’ should take place by building small homes in a compact form close to urban amenities:

Despite the advice of the steering group and the sympathy of Amsterdam’s housing professionals, the planning department remained in favour of comprehensive redevelopment and of replacing tenement houses with more spacious family dwellings, each with more than 100 square metres of floor space and built at densities of 60 to 80 homes per hectare.Footnote ³⁴ This would inevitably result in further population loss: Amsterdam would shrink to a city of only 500,000 inhabitants. In 1977, the department published a draft memorandum based on these principles, stating that central neighbourhoods should not provide ‘transit housing’ to a young, mobile population but should instead be places where affluent families could thrive, supported by appropriate facilities and ample living space. In some urban renewal neighbourhoods, the planners estimated that within only a few years more than half of the original population had been ‘replaced’ by ‘vulnerable’ groups such as students and guest workers. This ‘asymmetrical’ population structure, they argued, should not be allowed to ‘freeze’, as it would further jeopardize the quality of local amenities and reduce social mobility and societal integration.Footnote ³⁵

Throughout the 1970s, the family values of the planning department were met with increasing hostility. Figurehead of the resistance was Michael van der Vlis (1944–2018), a young Jane Jacobs-inspired community activist turned city councillor who was a passionate advocate of Amsterdam’s existing social and physical fabric. He described the typical urbanites of the 1970s as a motley crew of ‘artists, students, homosexuals and lesbians, and people who wanted to start their own business’. In Amsterdam, socially active individuals living in alternative household arrangements had come to serve as the city’s ‘social glue’.Footnote ³⁶ According to Van der Vlis, the traditional family model – consisting of a male breadwinner, housewife and children – had ceased to be the standard. He saw the inner-city neighbourhoods, allegedly in better shape than planners had assumed, as a perfect habitat for first-time homebuyers and budding entrepreneurs. Already by 1975 he was raising concerns about the effects of comprehensive redevelopment:

He lashed out against the 1977 planning memorandum, especially with regard to the allegedly negative consequences of an unbalanced urban population:

One-person households were much more oriented towards social interaction beyond their own homes, an observation Van der Vlis underpinned with statistics and comparisons to other European cities. It was precisely this group that needed access to urban living, especially since the socialist movement had long sought liberation from traditional family structures: designing housing units for individuals advanced the emancipation of marginalized groups in society. When Van der Vlis and others engaged in these discussions, housing seekers unwilling or unable to wait for the outcome decided to take matters into their own hands. The 1970s saw the emergence of alternative living arrangements, in which (mostly young) residents experimented with new forms of communal living that combined collective and individualistic lifestyles. They received support from a thriving squatting movement and interest groups that opposed the nuclear family as the basic unit for social reproduction.Footnote ³⁹

The idealism of the communes, which mostly included one-person households living in a separate room (or rooms) within the same building, often had a practical background. Economic motives, emotional support and companionship were just as important as the pursuit of a more just society.Footnote ⁴⁰ The Volle Maan (Full Moon) commune considered itself a ‘businesslike’ community, purchasing a smart nineteenth-century villa and subdividing the property into apartments for nine happy singles.Footnote ⁴¹ A singleton living in a former school building close to the city centre described group living as a middle ground: ‘We just don’t want to live alone, and living together with one other person takes away a large part of your personal freedom.’Footnote ⁴² Members of another centrally located commune called the family an ‘isolating form of living together’, while living in a group offered ‘individual and collective development’.Footnote ⁴³ Communes clustered around but were not limited to Amsterdam’s central areas. Residents of a shared apartment in a modernist estate on the city’s fringe were looking for ‘privacy without loneliness’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Contrary to what local newspaper Het Parool had expected, the individuals living in such arrangements were well-behaved urbanites: ‘No group sex, no massive orgasms in huge beds, no jumping fleas or heavily moldy food remains. None of that. We are dealing with very neat, civilized (young) citizens.’Footnote ⁴⁵

In the 1978 municipal elections, Van der Vlis and many of his progressive comrades were elected to office. A rejuvenated Labour Party led a coalition comprising the Dutch Communist Party (CPN), the progressive liberals (D66) and the Christian Democrats (CDA), the latter representing a notable outlier within an otherwise consistently progressive alliance. They promptly dismantled the powerful planning department and began implementing policies that favoured one- and two-person households. Bureaucratic disagreements between municipal departments, along with organizational, technical and financial challenges, meant that the production of HAT units, originally proposed in 1975, got off to a slow start.

However, momentum picked up once Van der Vlis and his allies assumed municipal leadership. HAT units were constructed in a variety of unconventional spaces: squatted buildings that were purchased and decommodified through coordinated efforts by the municipality and housing corporations, vacant schools, commercial properties, rooms above shops and even attic floors of existing apartment buildings. Production rose dramatically, from just 47 units in 1978 to nearly 1,400 by 1983.Footnote ⁴⁶ Although government subsidies were quickly phased out in the 1980s, leaving HAT units as a botched experiment in housing for smaller households, their significance was primarily political: they highlighted the housing shortage faced by a growing cohort of (mostly young) urbanites and raised awareness of the need for policies catering to non-traditional households. Not all groups originally targeted by the HAT policies wished to live in such accommodation. Older people generally preferred retirement homes, while migrants who had arrived alone often reunited with family members from their countries of origin and therefore required more space.

Whether in HAT units or in other non-family housing arrangements, Figures 4 and 5 confirm that during the period under study one-person households became concentrated in Amsterdam’s central areas. This reflects the nature of the local housing stock, the urban renewal policies adopted by the Van der Vlis administration and the availability of urban amenities catering to the needs and wishes of people living alone. Connecting such findings to other variables (e.g. household income, average dwelling size, year of construction, ownership) in future research will help to investigate the relationship between who was living alone, where and how. The recent digitization of Amsterdam’s woningkaarten (housing registers), which detail the number, age and gender of household members for individual addresses, duration of residence and new addresses after moving, has great potential for further analysing the housing trajectories of one-person households.

Notwithstanding this pilot study’s focus on government interventions, it should be emphasized that most people living alone – regardless of age or social background – obtained accommodation on the private rental market. The subletting of rooms by landlords and landladies, and the prevalence of multiple-occupation housing, were as common in Amsterdam as in any other major European city at the time. Towards the end of the twentieth century, the rise of the yuppie in economically successful cities also heralded a new housing culture in which living alone came to be regarded as the epitome of individualism, as reflected in the growing involvement of commercial developers and the increasing popularity of high-end studios and one-bedroom flats.

Integrating housing market mechanisms into the broader history of solo living is more challenging than analysing government responses, which has been the primary focus of this article, but might be achieved by consulting (digitized) housing advertisements in newspapers. A close reading of these newspapers as qualitative sources can also further illuminate how single living was experienced and perceived.