We do not commonly think of data as a belonging. It is invisible, weightless, stored somewhere in the cloud — or so the fiction goes. In reality, data is material: it occupies space, consumes energy, and is housed in massive infrastructure distributed across suburban lots and city centres. More importantly, data is produced by us — through every search, purchase, and digital interaction — and yet its ownership remains contested, captured by default by the platforms and enterprises that process it.

This project begins from a different premise: that data is a personal belonging, as much as the objects we collect and store in our homes, and that the right to data can be spatially claimed. It takes the storage space — from the cabinet of curiosities to the fallout shelter, from the hard disk drive to the data centre — as both its historical precedent and its architectural proposition. As material possessions construct and maintain social relationships, so too does the space that holds them. When storage disappears from domestic architecture, as it increasingly has under the pressure of land value and the logic of maximising lettable area, something more than convenience is lost

The project proposes a new storage device and a new room — housing both digital and physical belongings — introduced into social housing at three scales of sharing: the individual unit, the shared party wall between two households, and the communal corridor accessible to an entire floor. Tested on vacant sites in Hackney Wick adjacent to the iCity development, the proposal treats the boundary between cabinet, room, and infrastructure as the site where the right to immaterial belongings can be spatially declared.