Masters of Degrowth Week 8.1: Seminar 3 Housing for Degrowth

 Framing Degrowth: Tiny house mobility (Chapter 6 Housing for Degrowth)

• Tiny houses can be an ally for housing for degrowth, but it should include anti capitalist and anti colonialist strategies, and go beyond miniturised middle class homes
• April Anson explains that her experience is that building such houses is more complex and expensive than expected
• The concept has been appropiate and used by so companies offering 100.000$ tiny houses
• There are legal challenges related to recognising such houses as a permanent dwelling
• It is also challenging to fully insure the house
• Hard to park the house close to places of social interaction, work...
• Tiny houses tends to support a romantic and separated relantionship with natural spaces
• Thoses houses are fully dependent on property laws, and do not hold their false claims of freedom
• Degrowth critizes more explicitely the commoditization of housing as the tiny house movement does

Christiania. A poster child for degrowth? Natasha Verco (Chapter 8 Housing for Degrowth)

Christiania is a community in Copenhagen of about 900 residents who lively closely to the principles of degrowth of autonomy and conviviality.

Despite its low average income, is reporting high life standards.

Contrary to the typical governance in many towns or cities, Christiana refuses to receive imposed ruling from the city goverment, ensuring that there is an entitlement to the goals of the community without inference of external developmental policies. This is probably one of the recipes of success from the case with respect other dense sentlements where one do not observe a reduction in metabolism or sufficient wellbeing.

A collective tax has been agreed to respond to goverment pressures to be part of the finances of the state, but a part of the money collected is keep for services provided in the community.

There is little sustainability enforcing, with the expection of being a car free town.

One of the differentiated features is that housing is outside commoditization, and is not trade nor right for inheritance. The low cost of living on this town, mainly due to the different approach to housing free ups many people from working full time and enable them to engage more socially and consume less.

A combination of self management, decommodification of homes and reduced consumption explain why Christiania is a successful case of housing for degrowth.

This case is not exeptionally feasible due to Danish "tolerance" as there has been several attempts to change the ways of the town and bring it back to "towns as usual".

Low Impact Living: More than a house (Chapter 12 Housing for Degrowth)

Low impact housing does not depend on fossil fuels and can be maintained with local sources.

Current regulations and standards are not necessary supporting functional, affordable and simple housing and living. 

Permaculture is an example of a housing that is integrated and in harmony with the environment, resilient to global supply chains and artificially scarce expertise on modern housing. It also frees from the concept of waste as it is truly circular.

The undercroft in walles is an example of non professional house creation with local materials, smaller than average sizing, while well insulated from the cold and heat. Designs are based on two years observation of the climate and the very local specific details that affect each house. Despite the goverment attempts to block the project, the community proved that the houses were safe and functional.

A similar experience can be found in Holzen, Germany, after the authors took a 2 week permaculture course and help in the construction of another house.

‘Housing sovereignty’ means to be independent of unsustainable building practices that harm our planet. Concrete, for example, is one of the most obvious problems in modern building and architecture.

But, beyond reducing emissions, our aim is to decolonise housing from ‘mega-machine’ capitalism

Reading A Simple Roundhouse Manual by Tony Wren (2015) was very helpful for us to believe in our abilities and our potential.

The way we produced the bales shows our general approach: arrange a huge picnic, send an email to thirty friends, and get in contact with some experts and your neighbour who has a big barn.

We found a person who had done technical analyses for an outdoor museum – a Bronze Age theme park, where they had built round wood houses – so we tried to contact the responsible engineer. He was an interesting combination of a conservative local politician, a passionate hunter, a classical and experienced construction engineer, and he was open to eco-friendly ideas and our building project.

This was our opportunity to work with a classical, but open-to-new-ideas engineer who could fit our vision into German planning regulations.

Talk to officials personally and explain that you need their help to safely and correctly build something that is good for the environment and its inhabitants.

But we waited too long to talk in detail to the owner of the slaughterhouse and the officials because we did not want to stir things up. Unfortunately, we tried too hard not to be annoying or ‘super special’ with respect to our roundhouse project

We worked joyfully together with a sensation of freedom and the feeling that we were taking a small step towards something that is globally relevant: personal growth and self-fulfilment without harming the planet, the opposite of paying for a house to be built by companies that are part of mega-maine capitalism.

Limiting factors to LID, such as low rural population density, keep people yoked to travelling for education, leisure, income and purchasing food. More people living a low impact lifestyle is a positive driver for degrowth; a greater diversity of people and their livelihoods will create more goods and services and reduce patterns of unsustainable production and consumption