This book examines the growing trend for housing models that shrink private living space and seeks to understand the implications of these shrinking domestic worlds. Small spaces have become big business. Reducing the size of our homes, and the amount of stuff within them, is increasingly sold as a catch-all solution to the stresses of modern life and the need to reduce our carbon footprint. Shrinking living space is being repackaged in a neoliberal capitalist context as a lifestyle choice rather than the consequence of diminishing choice in the face of what has become a long-term housing ‘crisis’. What does this mean for how we live in the long term, and is there a dark side to the promise of a simpler, more sustainable home life? Shrinking Domesticities brings together research from across the social sciences, planning and architecture to explore these issues. From co-living developments to the Tiny House Movement, self-storage units to practices of ‘de-stuffification’, and drawing on examples from across Europe, North America and Australasia, the authors of this volume seek to understand both what micro-living is bringing to our societies, and what it may be eroding
This book examines the growing trend for housing models that shrink private living space and seeks to understand the implications of these shrinking domestic worlds.
Introduction;1 Co-living Housing-as-a-Service and COVID-19:
Micro-housing and Institutional Precarity-Tegan Bergan & Rae Dufty-Jones; 2
Shifting Domesticities in the Metropole Hotel-Jeffrey Kruth; 3 Political
Narratives of Shrinking Domesticities in Helsinki and Vienna-Johanna Lilius,
Michael Friesenecker & Maximilian Krankl;4 Shrinking aspirations: the
potential impact of Build to Rent models on housing transitions-Daniel
Durrant & Frances Brill; 5 Glamorising the materiality of living small:
De-stuffocation, storage, and tiny living aesthetics-Jen Owen; 6 Freedom or
dispossession? Imaginaries of small, mobile living in the film
Nomadland-Harris, E., Nowicki, M. and White, T.; 7 Decent Homes in Compact
Living? Conventional Ideals in Unconventional Contexts-Anne Hedegaard
Winther; 8 The Tiny Home Lifestyle (THL): A contemporary response to the
neoliberalisation of housing-Megan Carras; 9 Understanding tiny house
sustainabilities through the lens of frictions-Hilton Penfold., Gordon Waitt
and Pauline McGuirk; 10 Meshing with Your Home: Seeking trouble in sharing
dwelled spaces-Lauren Wagner & Clemens Driessen; 11 Minimalist lifestyles:
Performance, animism and desire for degrowth-Miriam Meissner; 12 Tiny Houses
and the Economics of Sufficiency: How Shrinking Domesticities fit within
the Degrowth Paradigm-Samuel Alexander and Heather Shearer; 13 Tiny Living as
an Everyday Practice of Sufficiency: Some Experiences of Tiny House Owners in
Germany-Petra Lütke & Louisa Elbracht; 14 The Tiny House Movement: Ecology,
survival and inequality-Jenny Pickerill, Adam Barker & Jingjing Wang; 15
Cluster apartments: living with less as model for lived solidarity?-Manuel
Lutz; 16 Heterotopia: A New Perspective on Female-led Tiny House
Projects-Alice Wilson; Conclusion
Ella Harris is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Urban/Cultural Geography at Birkbeck, University of London, UK.
Mel Nowicki is a Reader in Urban Geography at Oxford Brookes University, UK.
Tim White is a undertaking a PhD in Cities at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK.