The thesis puts forward the management of domestic space through the transformation of the concept of the private within the socio-economic regime known as neoliberalism. It proposes a critical reassessment of housing privatisation not merely as a policy introduced in the 1980s to promote new contractual relationships, but as a post-war urban strategy through which a broader change in ethos, culture and the organisation of housing was established.Against the neoliberal idea of the institutional autonomy of the private, the thesis argues that the state has constantly partnered the market, or ‘private sector’, in promoting a certain pedagogy of domestic privacy and that, therefore, the private has hardly existed ‘as such’ in the neoliberal era. Methodologically, the thesis deploys typological study to demystify this pedagogy through selected urban housing schemes in London, Berlin and Athens, marking a geographical and chronological trajectory of neoliberal advance from anticipation to severe crisis.The investigation sheds light on the links between the narrative of privacy and the construction of middle-class subjectivity and lifestyle, the proprietary and symbolic function of urban form, and the colonisation of housing by financial capitalism through home ownership, household debt and dispossession. The failure of the neoliberal housing model to secure domestic privacy as a form of essential autonomy recalls the term’s classical meaning of deprivation.As a response, the thesis proposes a shift from the economy towards an ecology of the private, which acts as an operational principle for institutional and typological transformation in urban housing. The simultaneous and reciprocal formation of private and collective subjectivity defines the social relations upon which the right to privacy may be reclaimed: against private property, through communal ownership of urban land for housing; and against individualism, through commoning as the possibility of securing a quality of being private.