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…

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…

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,…

by James Evans The UK housing crisis is a key challenge for our times – demand far outstrips supply and   Ministers are seeking solutions, such as plans to create new ‘garden cities’.  But are policy-makers taking enough notice of the urban experiments that have already taken place around the world and are the right questions…

By Rhiannon Firth Utopia is a complex and contested concept, which I have covered in more detail in my book Utopian Politics. The word utopia is a neologism coined by Sir Thomas More in his 1561 novel of this name. It is a pun on three Greek words: eu (good) ou (no) and topos (place), so…

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…

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…

By Professor Tendai Chitewere, San Francisco State University Keynote speaker for our first event: Urban Eco-communities Interest in sustainable communities has been growing around the world. Community activists, academics, and national governments are debating how to create places to live that reduce our human impact on the environment and improve the health and well-being. Although…

We are very grateful for funding from the Urban Studies Foundation to run these workshops