This book is divided into three parts – on past developments, current trends and likely futures. However, even in Part I, the focus is on recent
Figure 1.2 A modest infill development in an inner suburb of Melbourne (Nest Architects)
Source: Nic Granleese, photographer
developments in as much as housing and households of the past are reviewed on the basis of twenty-first century themes of sustainability and affordability. The analysis is inclusive of a diversity of household types and economic circumstances but precludes specific analyses of cultures, gender, ethnicity and race due to lack of both space and sufficient relevant research. Throughout the book discussion centres, instead, on social movements supporting affordable and appropriate housing whose concerns inform and coincide with the prerogatives of small and shared housing.
The book starts by reviewing the history of housing and households, with a special emphasis on relevant changes during the twentieth century. Remarkably, the typical household shrank from an extended intergenerational family with several children to a conventional nuclear family with a couple of children and, finally, a range of parent–child households with de facto couples, same-sex couples, step-families, single-parent households and blended families. Towards the end of the twentieth century, higher separation and divorce rates and extended average life spans had resulted in a diverse mixture of predominantly smaller households, many with single half-time parents and elderly couples or singles. Most significantly for housing, on average, households diminished from circa 4.5 to 2.5 members.
At the same time as household sizes contracted, in certain countries such as the US, Canada and Australia, newly built houses especially in outer-city suburbs grew in size right up to the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, significantly triggered by residential mortgage defaults. The trends and counter-trends to ‘McMansions’ were not as marked in Europe. Indeed, in Britain, the persistence of smaller houses has been detrimentally associated with poor housing stock. In most cities across the world, as populations rose depressing slum living became more apparent. Today, up to one-third of Earth’s urban residents (1bn people) still live in slums.18 So, even if for different reasons, in most countries the growing ecological case for smaller residential footprints was at odds with mainstream ideals for larger housing in spacious land developments. The apparent novelty of the mainly North American tiny house movement illustrates the distance between mainstream and alternative ideals.19
Meanwhile, during the last few decades, an increasing range of residents, urban planners, architects, government agencies and activists have recognised – even if implicitly rather than, as here, explicitly – that coupling shared with small makes greatest social and ecological sense.
They have observed, drawn on and benefited from numerous insights gained from various experiments since the 1960s, when a generation evolved that was prepared to challenge ‘the Establishment’ by living in alternative ways – and from a more recent generation, many of whom who regard ‘green’ as an axiom. Today sustainable urban innovations appear in places as far apart as Barcelona (Spain) and Melbourne (Australia), and feature significantly in inner-city, suburban and peri-urban cohousing and ecovillages in Europe and North America.
Today, the drivers range from self-organising residents and proactive governments to niche markets created by entrepreneurs recognising the demand for sustainable, community-oriented developments.
Small Is Necessary tells this story, showing the potential for smaller and shared models of housing to meet current and future social and environmental challenges.
Parts: past, present, future
Part I reviews how inner-urban housing always tended to be compact and remained so as more households moved to cities. While detached houses in North American and Australian suburbs tended to increase in floor space right up to the Global Financial Crisis, apartments and town houses in cities such as London, Tokyo and New York City had always been characterised by compact, high-density living, blending modern with traditional designs. Clever interior design appeared critical in small inner urban spaces, where householders incorporated technological advances in household appliances and furniture – from kitchen wizardry to sofa beds and foldaway wall beds – in symbiosis with working more outside the home and flourishing streetscape cultures.
However, tiny private urban spaces became socially insular nuclear-family pressure cookers. Moreover, while achieving valuable energy savings in sectors such as transport, the overall consumption of many households in compact cities such as New York are not envi-ronmentally sustainable. In such locations apartments have not meant cheaper housing either; micro-apartments have been attractive to investors in the mid-2010s because they attract higher rents space-wise.
These factors, along with deindustrialisation, the rise of information economies, city pollution, pockets of disadvantage, gentrification and suburbanisation have shown weaknesses of a simple small and compact urban model.
Chapter 2 focuses on very select historical developments: reflecting the rise of capitalism, the home retreated from a workspace to a place of respite and diversions from work except, of course, for beavering housewives. Today, home has re-emerged as a work base for growing numbers of self-employed, contractors and e-workers. Many urbanites opted for life in a detached or semi-detached house in suburbs with demographic changes in household composition and size influencing, interacting and clashing with developments in house styles, floor plans and house sizes over the twentieth century. Meanwhile, owner-occupier dwellings have become a strange amalgam of capitalist commodity and asset – impacting on house and apartment prices.
Chapter 3 focuses on apartments to find that many of their environ-mental, social and economic limitations and potential were clear very early on – replicated across geographies and multiplied as industrialisa-tion and urbanisaindustrialisa-tion both expanded and contracted. Green apartments, micro-apartments and utopian apartment living all come in for scrutiny.
While current policies and plans for future cities favour medium- to high-density, compact and ‘smart’ urban developments, such apartments are often unaffordable, and not even environmentally sound and appropriate living spaces. Social inequities and ecological unsustainabil-ity appear closely integrated in analyses involving apartment size.
Chapter 4 walks right into apartments, reviewing their interior sus-tainability and dwellers’ sussus-tainability practices beyond their dwelling.
The implications of domestic technology and household consumption are discussed. Modest and comfortable, cleverly designed and used apartments, are identified and characterised. However, despite market forces claiming that what they offer is a response to demand, we find that real resident engagement might well be key to decisive improvements in the affordability, sustainability and sociality of residential planning and buildings.
In short, Part I covers the persistence of, and countertendencies generated by, small private household living in highly urbanising infra-structures. These narratives highlight push and pull factors leading to the small and shared social and environmental developments examined in Part II, where a clear distinction is drawn between eco-cohousing and ecovillages.
The eco-cohousing Chapter 5 starts with smaller collaborative initiatives, such as a house, land, and farming enterprise co-owned by three or more non-related residents. Many and various cohousing models are
testimony to bottom-up pressures to escape alienated lifestyles typified by a career ‘rat-race’ and stereotyped male–female roles in households.
Over the four decades since cohousing projects began, designs have tended towards smaller private areas, larger common facilities and greater eco-efficient and environmentally friendly features.20
A spirit of social empowerment, visions of shared collective housing and concerns about the environmental costs of mainstream urban living have encouraged urban and peri-urban ecovillages in the UK and Europe (Chapter 6). The specific ecovillages discussed show clear achievements in terms of ecological footprint measures. I highlight well-established projects that have pioneered ways of addressing the economic, social and environmental needs for compact housing by sharing common spaces and facilities through to those that integrate collective sufficiency in work-and-live arrangements.
By the twenty-first century, professionals, bureaucrats and politicians in certain countries, such as Germany, developed strategic and subtle responses to needs for environmental sustainability and social cohesion in cities. Part III examines outstanding examples of such top-down and bottom-up transfusions, involving sophisticated engagements between residents and the authorities servicing them, creating more environ-mentally robust and socially appropriate landscapes. As such Part III examines developments introduced in Part II but in the broader context of urban landscapes, urban planning and local governance. As a way to consider the future scaling-up of small and shared living, and shared landscapes, each chapter focuses on a specific driver: the state (Chapter 7), the market (Chapter 8) and grassroots communities (Chapter 9).
These three chapters offer models of, and principles for, extending smaller footprints and shared living spaces across urban and rural landscapes. Practical examples include European models where archi-tectural and cultural heritage are preserved by community-oriented developments; an Australian environmental living zone, which evolved after principles established in a neighbourhood residential cooperative were readily adopted by local private landowners and households; and a post-capitalist eco-industrial village established by ex-squatters in the remains of a Catalan factory village replete with hacker space and environmental remediation projects. I discuss participatory governance and sharing economy initiatives to show how communities in collective spaces have forged skills readily transferable to urban planning and governance, becoming a catalyst for participatory design in cities.
Another theme shows how nature has been, and can be, brought into cityscapes with cohousing and urban ecovillages as the beating heart of these efforts. Alternative technology and energy sources offer new oppor-tunities for efficiently servicing residential housing; infrastructure and vital service providers are developing models known as co-management and co-production. Here, sharing household equipment, resources and services meets collaborative consumption, nonmonetary swap and barter networks, and community-supported agriculture. There are emerging initiatives for household and neighbourhood collective sufficiency integrated into holistic patterns for city and rural living.
conclusion
In summary, small and shared housing and living is a ‘necessary but not sufficient’ principle for more environmentally sustainable livelihoods and socially convivial lifestyles. In arguing that the future direction is to smaller and more shared living spaces, I am not so much signalling a totally new future as a return to historical social norms. However, equally, our future will not be a simple return to the past, if only because other factors, such as population growth, environmental pressures, technological developments, and the still antagonistic trend of certain market forces, mean that the movement for small and shared living has come from various quarters as a countertrend to mainstream ideals and has an environmental rationale specific to our time.
In short, whether for environmental, affordability or social reasons, sharing is becoming a natural and necessary complement to small. Small Is Necessary offers constructive critiques and a state-of-the-art summary of a range of existing developments and future possibilities appropriate for various contexts, pointing out attractive, feasible housing solutions for enjoying more with less.