BLOG: Collaborative housing futures: paradoxes and possibilities in crisis

By Melissa Fernández Arrigoitia (@femimeli) Collaborative and community-led housing models like co-housing, self-build, eco-communities and CLTs (amongst others) are as an attractive, even radical alternative that can challenge dominant forms of mainstream housing provision and the conditions of crisis that characterize it (e.g., widespread unaffordability and insecurity). These resident-led schemes offer different logics and practices to…

BLOG: Tiny Homes as forms of resistance

By Alice Wilson, see more info at: http://tinyhouseresearch.co.uk/ Critical scholars have investigated at length what the repercussions have been for the Culture of Real Estate (CORE) following the 2008 financial crash (Colombini, 2019; Hanan, 2010). Having been nurtured by the coalescing forces of deregulatory policies, favourable market conditions, and an attitude shift towards considering property…

BLOG: Tiny Homes

By Alice Wilson  (http://tinyhouseresearch.co.uk) My interest in tiny houses preceded my intention to pay scholarly attention to their emancipatory potential. Like so many of my now participants, I was just poor and indignant at a housing system that appeared to be rigged. I was born poor, but I worked hard at becoming indignant. What was,…

BLOG: Already existing experiments (or how the camping music festival tells us about some social dynamics that sustainability experiments tend to forget)

Dr Alison Browne, Geography, University of Manchester Festivals, and particularly camping music festivals in the UK, are characterised by many as hedonistic playgrounds. They are not necessarily ‘low impact development’ (cf Pickerill & Maxey, 2009) and they do come with substantial environmental impacts including the carbon emitted by people travelling to get to them, the…

BLOG: Eco-Communities in an Urban Future

By Anitra Nelson Eco-communities have been created and operate in challenging unsustainable, inequitable and urban contexts. Working towards more environmentally sustainable lifestyles and one planet footprints within market-based economies oriented towards infinite growth results in perpetual contradictions. Inequalities that arise as an essential social and economic dynamic of capitalism reverberate through all the practices and…