Small is Necessary

Front matter

small

is necessary shared living

ona shared planet anitra nelson

Introduction

. Less Is More: Living Closely on a Finite Planet

PARTI COMPACT URBAN HOUSING

. Once We Were Small: Traditional and Contemporary Homes

. Apartment Living in Cities . Apartment Household Practices and Affordability PART II ECO-COHOUSING AND ECOVILLAGES . From Sharing a House to Eco-cohousing . Ecovillages: Sustainability and System Change PART III FUTURES: SCALING UP, SHARED LANDSCAPES, SHARED LIVELIHOODS

. ‘Will You Dance with Us? Governments and Collaborative Housing

. “To Market, to Market’: Eco-collaborative Housing for Sale

. Grassroots Sustainability, Sociality and Governance

. Small Is Necessary and, with Sharing, Feasible

Appendix: Key Sources and Links Notes Index

161 190

1.1

1.2

2.1 2.2

3.1

3.2

3.3 3.4

3-5

3.6 3-7 3.8

4.1 4.2 4.3 5.1 5.2

6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5

List of Figures, Tables and Boxes

FIGURES

Commonground intentional community, Central Victoria, Australia

A modest infill development in an inner suburb of Melbourne (Nest Architects)

Birmingham (UK) back-to-backs

Peters-Margedant House, as rendered by Adam Green Schematic impression of a Californian garden walk-up apartment

Energy savings from German apartments retrofitted using passive house principles

Habitat ’67 today in Montreal (Moshe Safdie, architect) Patrick Blanc vertical garden at Caixa Forum, Madrid (Herzog & de Meuron Architects, Basel, Switzerland) Bosco Verticale (Vertical Forest) apartments, Milan (Boeri Studio, Milan)

Boxhome in Oslo, Norway (Rintala Eggertson Architects) Sketches of Boxhome (Rintala Eggertson Architects, Oslo) East Village Studio NYC (Jordan Parnass Digital Architecture)

Floor plan Hong Kong apartment, 93sq m

Floor plan Paris apartment, 36sq m

Floor plan London basement apartment, 49sq m Summerland Mansions, St Kilda (Melbourne, Australia) Early schematic design rendering for Jamaica Plain Cohousing

Exterior of a Lammas dwelling

Interior of a Lammas dwelling

Masterplan sketch of Cloughjordan Ecovillage Cloughjordan Community Farm: Hard at work ploughing Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage: An aerial view

13 25 31

59 63

65 67 67

69 82 83 84 103

124 134 139 145 147 149

2.2 6.1

6.1 9.1

FIGURES, TABLES AND BOXES

Spreefeld: Three blocks of collaborative housing on the River Spree, Berlin

Photo and sketch of tiny house, West Australia

A Ceilidh at Tinkers Bubble

Christiania, 2011

Calafou, 2012

TABLES

Types of household by household type (%), 2011 (or nearest available)

Floor space of new builds in 15 countries, 2009

DRE average carbon footprint compared with the US average (CO -e metric tonnes)

Typology of drivers of eco-collaborative housing models

in the twenty-first century

BOXES

Los Angeles Eco- Village Core Values An Occupy placard created by Sabrina from Twin Oaks, 2012

+ vii

173 208 221 230 236

35 40

143 223

BBC BedZED BICA BREEAM

BVCLT bn

Abbreviations

British pounds

dollars

Australian dollars

Euros

three-dimensional

Australian Bureau of Statistics

Australian Conservation Foundation Australian Capital Territory

accessory dwelling unit

also known as

British Broadcasting Commission Beddington Zero Energy Development

Bend of Islands Conservation Association Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Methodology (UK rating system) Beverly- Vermont Community Land Trust Billion

California

Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (London, 1999-2011)

central business district

Common Equity Housing Ltd

combined heat and power

Catalan Integral Cooperative (Cooperativa Integral Catalana)

community land trust

Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation carbon dioxide

carbon dioxide equivalent (carbon emissions) 21 Conference of the Parties (to UNFCCC) 22 Conference of the Parties (to UNFCCC) Cooperative Resources and Services Project community supported agriculture

ABBREVIATIONS : ix

DC District of Columbia

DCLG Department for Communities and Local Government

DELWP Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning (Victoria, Australia)

Dy ecological footprint distance

DELWP Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning (Victoria, Australia)

DIO do it ourselves

DRE Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage

E2C2 ecology and economics, community and consciousness (approach of Litfin)

ELZ environmental living zone

ft feet

ft? sq ft

GEN Global Ecovillage Network

gha global hectare (to quantify human ecological footprints and biocapacity)

GHG greenhouse gas

GPS global positioning system

HHP Hockerton Housing Project

IDO interim development order

INURA International Network for Urban Research and Action

IPCC Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

kw kilowatt kWh/(m7a) kilowatt hour (of energy) per square meter per annum l litres

LAEV Los Angeles Eco-Village

LEED Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design LID low impact development

Lilac low impact living affordable community m metre(s)

m’? sqm

MA Massachusetts

MEF Moreland Energy Foundation

MHOS Mutual Home Ownership Society

NHF National Housing Federation (UK) NHF National Housing Federation

NSW New South Wales

NYC New York City x + SMALL IS NECESSARY

NZ NZ$ OECD

OPD p.a.

P2P PIA PV RBCC RIBA RMIT S$

UK ULI UN UNFCCC

UNRISD URL

WwWOOFers ZAD

New Zealand

New Zealand dollars

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

One Planet Development (as in Welsh policy)

per annum

peer-to-peer

Planning Institute of Australia

photovoltaic

Round the Bend Conservation Co-operative

Royal Institute of British Architects

Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (university) Singapore dollars

United Kingdom

Urban Land Institute

United Nations

United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change

United Nations Research Institute for Social Research Uniform Resource Locator

United States

United States dollars

Urban Soil/Tierra Urbana

volt(s)

watts

Willing Workers on Organic Farms

Zone a Défendre

Glossary

Accessory dwelling units: unit partitioned out of a larger, say family, dwelling or detached dwelling alongside a larger one, aka Granny flats (Australia) or self-contained studio/unit/dwelling created for supplementary income, independent children and caregivers.

Affordable housing: for eligibility and statistical purposes variously defined. In Australia typically referring to housing that costs the household less than 30 per cent of their gross income to live in (includes mortgage or rental payments, insurance, maintenance, council rates and property taxes but not necessarily costs of essential services, such as operational energy and water services). All such definitions, standards and measures neglect aspects and spawn anomalies such as under-used dwellings and ‘overcrowding, accommodation as in-kind remuneration for employment, ‘energy poverty and precarious employment.

Apartment block: separate multi-household dwellings each separately owned or rented, with potential for voluntary community bonds and sharing of resources, goods and services.

Baugemeinschaften, ‘community building partnerships’ or ‘building communities: privately owned dwellings with collective ownership of shared spaces.

Baugruppen: self-administering building groups of owner-occupiers who collectively buy land, collaboratively design, and sometimes labour on, a multi-household build (baugruppe).

Cohousing: purposively co-located and connected neighbourhoods of multiple households, each household with a private dwelling but sharing, with their cohousing neighbours, specific common spaces (such as a common house), resources (such as community gardens and cars) and activities (such as preparing and eating meals). Such settlements have formal, legal, community governance arrangements covering rules for entry and exit, shared access, maintenance, fees and other sets of mutual obligations and expectations. Legal models and names xii + SMALL IS NECESSARY for such arrangements are many and various, including cooperative, condo(minium) association and ‘collective house’ (Japan).

CoHousing: a generic European term for collaboratively designed and built housing spaces for multiple households that develop ‘self-managed social architectures’ to share activities and experiences, not just spaces and resources (see id22).

Co-housing: used, especially with respect to European models, to refer to multiunit housing that involves some level of self-organisation, as in collectively built, co-located and self-managed (collectively managed) housing. The comparable term in this work is the all-encompassing ‘collaborative housing’

Collaborative housing: a generic term for housing typically produced by professional and industry partners with prospective residents and, once established, maintained by household types that function as a community of residents who share amenities, facilities and spaces.

Communes: communal living with a ‘common-purse, income-sharing, and making joint decisions over financial spending and numerous personal activities, i.e. operating as ‘one household; sometimes a working and living arrangement, and/or all-under-one-roof.

Condo(minium) (NA): privately owned units on commonly owned land governed by an association of owners (similar to ‘strata title’ in Australia).

Consensual decision-making: the process of making a joint decision, which involves the time and space for open discussion by all participants of various issues and options, and an outcome that each agrees to hold to even despite certain misgivings. (Many groups have a modified consensual decision-making process where, say a 90 per cent, majority vote suffices in cases of deadlock or inappropriate delays.)

Cooperative housing: typically, where residents are members of a corporation that is the common owning body (US); where housing is owned by resident-members as a non-profit enterprise (Australia); where resident-members own shares (Germany).

Eco (prefix): projects with intentional Earth-friendly housing and ecologically sensitive householder practices, at the very least energy- and water-efficient housing, growing productive and ecologically sensible

GLOSSARY ° xiii plants (typically using permaculture principles) and sourcing sustainably produced foods.

Ecological footprint: the amount of land necessary to supply the resources on which a resident’s consumption relies.

Ecovillage: a relatively self-contained settlement of dwellings pursuing collective sufficiency and ecological balance within Earth’s regenerative potential and limits, both locally and globally.

Garden city: urban settlement planned to maximise green spaces, typically green parklands surrounding a mix of residential, commercial and light industrial developments.

Intentional community: a community whose members intend to maintain a self-governing community with self-defined goals.

Kibbutz: collective communities, both secular and religious, developed in the nineteenth century and initially based on agriculture, with around one-third still income sharing; up to two per cent of Israel’s population still live in kibbutzim.

Low impact development (LID): developments intended to create a whole-of-life equilibrium with their productively used natural surrounds (thus, ‘low impact communities’).

Marginal rental housing: highly managed housing, with fewer occupancy rights than for mainstream private and social housing tenants, and some degree of shared facilities and spaces. Examples include boarders in boarding houses and tenants in residential parks (with caravans and/or other types of mobile homes, including manufactured houses).

One planet development/living: applies the standard measure of potential and actual ecological footprints at both global and local levels to achieve and keep the level of resources residents consume within the earth's regenerative capacity.

Over-crowded housing: an international standard is the OECD indicator, which divides the total number of rooms in a dwelling by the number of its residents; however, many countries focus instead on the number of residents compared with bedrooms. As with much data on averages, national statistics often blur considerable underuse or overcrowding typical of specific regional or demographic cohorts.

xiv + SMALL IS NECESSARY

Participatory decision-making: serious engagement, often involving multiple stakeholders, using discursive, appreciative inquiry and many consensual decision-making techniques but allowing voting.

Pocket neighbourhoods: clustered dwellings surrounding shared open space, such as a courtyard or street, where households share responsibility and enjoyment of that space.

Share(d) house(hold) - aka a collective or joint household, cooperative house: typically, a rented house (sometimes a mansion), where personal rooms are private spaces and the rest of the space is shared, maintained and governed in non-hierarchical ways. Rules and protocol apply to householder members’ monetary contribution to the collective rent (all equal or different, say according to room size, amenity, and single, couple or family occupancy), splitting bills, buying, preparing and eating food, visitors, and tolerance of certain activities, including noise. Sharing a house is sometimes called cohouseholding or coliving.

Social housing: modest housing managed by government or not-for-profit bodies and specifically rented to those on low or low-medium incomes.

Squatting: inhabiting or doing other activities in a private property - thus making it a squat - without the permission of the owner (or leaseholder) whether for individualistic purposes or with a collective political rationale.

Tactical urbanism: applies a classic action research method and result for a suite of initiatives such as road calming, intersection repair, quirky block improvements and popup spaces (including cafes, benches, parklets and park-mobiles).

Tenement: separate dwellings (including single rooms) in a block of such, rented by tenants.

Tenant: deriving from the Latin ‘to hold’ (tener), to have use-rights over a property, a resident who rents their dwelling/property from a landlord (owner).

Utopian settlements: housing generally dominated by highly idealistic, well-defined and detailed plans and principles (a name emerging from such developments in the later nineteenth century).

NOTE

Throughout this work, dates in brackets next to names of buildings refer to the year in which their construction was completed or when they started to be inhabited for the residential purposes in question.

Acknowledgements

I benefitted enormously from a three-month writing fellowship at the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (2016-2017). This centre, a joint initiative between the university and the Deutsches Museum in Munich, has been supported substantially by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. In terms of writers and writing, it is the foremost international interdisciplinary centre for research and education in the environmental humanities and social sciences in the world. I thank all the dedicated staff at the centre and all the other fellows who read and constructively critiqued my work, and with whom I discussed generic writing issues and current environmental impasses.

I thank David Castle, Senior Commissioning Editor at Pluto Press, for his patience and support through delays of all kinds. This project began as a joint initiative with my late partner Frans Timmerman with whom I co-edited the Pluto Press book, Life Without Money: Building Fair and Sustainable Economies (2011). Soon after we signed the contract for Small Is Necessary, Frans was diagnosed with motor neurone disease (aka Lou Gehrig’s disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis). For around two years the project was put on hold as I cared for him and later grieved his death. However, Frans’ input into the initial concept and design of the project, and his steadfast support for such a work remained an inspiration.

I do not simply study, but have experience of, collaborative housing. In Victoria (Australia), I participated as an owner-builder in a mudbrick self-building scheme (mid-1980s), an all under-one-roof living-working rural commune (mid-1990s) and a residential peri-urban conservation cooperative (late 1990s). For several months I was a visiting resident of two impressive and enduring intentional communities located in east coast states of the United States. I thank all the people with whom I lived, and engaged, in these life journeys.

Alternative communities attract a good deal of grassroots attention and visitors, as well as being composed of a range of long-term and short-term residents - all these kinds of people taught me more about the frustrations and potential of collaborative living than learning, reading or

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS :: xvii talking in academia or professional contexts. At the same time, I cannot lightly dismiss all the informative discussions I have had with colleagues, architects, designers, planners, builders and other sustainability experts of all kinds. All of them, far too many too mention personally even as a short list, I thank profusely for confirming my prejudices and changing my mind, as the case might be.

Last, but not least, I am very grateful to acknowledge those from whom I obtained copyright permission to reproduce numerous images for this book:

Photographer Mike Crowhurst and Commonground intentional community (Central Victoria, Australia) for the photo of Commonground’s main building in Figure. 1.1.

Architectural photographer Nic Granleese (Melbourne, Australia) for the photo and Emilio Fuscaldo (Nest Architects, Melbourne) for the content of Figure 1.2.

Photograph of Birmingham (UK) back-to-backs (Figure 2.1) courtesy of UK National Trust Images/Robert Morris, Image ref 153032.

Adam J. Green Architect (Evansville, Indiana) for his rendering (Figure 2.2) of the Peters-Margedant House in Evansville, Indiana (US).

Taxiarchos228 at the German language Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11829063) for the photograph (Figure 3.3) of Habitat ’67 in Montreal (architect, Moshe Safdie).

Patrick Blanc for the photograph, Figure 3.4, of Caixa Forum Madrid, May 2010, designed by Herzog and de Meuron Architects, and the vertical garden wall by Patrick Blanc.

Boeri Studio, and photographer Paolo Rosselli for the photograph of the Bosco Verticale ‘Vertical Forest’ Milan apartments, Figure 3.5.

Ivan Brodey (photographer Oslo, Norway) for the photograph of Boxhome (Rintala Eggertson Architects) Oslo, Norway, Figure 3.6. Rintala Eggertsson Architects and artist John Roger Holte (Oslo,

Norway) for sketches of Boxhome, Figure 3.7.

Photographer Frank Oudeman/OTTO for the photograph of East Village Studio, NYC (Jordan Parnass Digital Architecture), Figure 3.8.

The three floor plans in Figures 4.1-4.3 - from pages 67, 142 and 93, respectively, in Terence Conran, Small Spaces: Inspiring Ideas and Creative Solutions, originally published by Conran Octopus, London 2001 — are used courtesy of Octopus Publishing Group.

xviii - SMALL IS NECESSARY

The photograph (Figure 5.1) of Summerland Mansions, St Kilda (Melbourne, Australia) is courtesy of Heritage Victoria.

Laura E. Fitch, architect (Amherst, Massachusetts) for her early schematic design rendering for Jamaica Plain Cohousing, Figure 5.2.

Simon Dale (photographer) and ‘www.beingsomewhere.net’ for the exterior (Figure 6.1) and the interior (Figure 6.2) of a Lammas dwelling.

Sustainable Projects Ireland (specifically Peadar Kirby) for the masterplan sketch of Cloughjordan Ecovillage (Figure 6.3) and Davie Philip for his photograph of ploughing at Cloughjordan Community Farm (Figure 6.4).

Jim Barmore, photographer of Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage, an aerial view (Figure 6.5) courtesy of Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage.

carpaneto.sch6ningh architekten (Berlin) and photographer Ute Zscharnt (Berlin) for the photograph of Spreefeld, Figure 7.1.

Post- (architectural practice, Perth) for the photo and sketch of a tiny house (West Australia) they designed, Figure 8.1.

Katja Testroet for a photo of a Ceilidh at Tinkers Bubble in south Somerset, England, Figure 9.1.

Kim Wyon (photographer) and VisitDenmark for Figure 9.2, a photograph of Christiania.

Introduction

Less Is More: Living Closely on a Finite Planet

This introductory chapter outlines why, and how, small and shared housing is a stepping stone towards environmentally sustainable livelihoods and socially convivial lifestyles this century. After sketching the global challenges that small and shared housing can address, I sketch out what small and shared living means on a personal level. Then I describe the structure of this book which, selectively reads the past (Part I), reviews the present (Part II) and speculates on the future of collaborative housing (Part III) at a time when economic and environmental challenges threaten life as we know it, even our species-life per se. Small Is Necessary: Shared Living on a Shared Planet addresses those massive challenges in constructive ways to show how community-based activities could make us live more sustainably.

THE CHALLENGES THAT FACE US

The enduring Great Recession following the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 unsettled households across the world. There have been negative impacts on work opportunities, incomes and government support for affordable social housing, contributing to unstable house prices and unfavourable terms of credit for purchasing homes. In some regions precarious employment, declining incomes and fewer government services have driven people to cities ill-equipped to cater for rapidly expanding numbers of job-seekers demanding a range of basic services. It has become commonplace for house prices to have risen alarmingly in capital cities, with impacts on rental demand and costs. By the mid-2010s, particularly in Europe, substantial migrations had contributed to temporary and permanent resettlements. Finding appropriate and affordable housing has become a widespread challenge, particularly for young and elderly singles, especially women whose savings and incomes are typically lower than similarly aged men.

This is a chronic crisis and, writing in 2017, the prognosis remains bleak. According to a Resolution Foundation Study, 90 per cent of 18-34-year-old Britons will be unable to afford their own homes and will be confined to renting by 2025.' This deterioration in housing affordability is replicated across the United States (US), Canada, Australia and New Zealand (NZ). On the one hand, housing industry sources often complain that regulatory constraints on land use containing the boundaries of cities are responsible for rising land and home prices.” On the other hand, remarkably high house prices in Australia, amongst other nations, have been attributed to the availability of more onerous home loans at low interest rates, which translate into lower mortgage repayments, and the preparedness of owner-occupiers to devote a relatively high proportion of income to housing costs. Another upward pressure on prices has been international investment, responsible for a two-tier real estate market developing in global cities, typically in capitals such as London where the mean house price was roughly double that of other parts of England in 2014-2015.4

Still, the trend to house price increases has been neither uniform nor universal in cities, regions or countries. For instance, with respect to other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, house prices and household debt multiplied remarkably in Sweden, Norway, France, Chile, Belgium, Israel and Denmark between 2000 and 2015, yet dropped in Portugal, Japan and Greece over the same period. Where house price hikes occurred they often flowed on to rental increases, especially in the US, and in Australia where there is low competition from that minor proportion (circa 4.5 per cent) of stock that is social housing (modest housing managed by government or not-for-profit bodies specifically for those on low incomes).°

Meanwhile, in terms of demand for housing and land for residential development, global population keeps rising. In 1800, there were just 1 billion (bn) human residents of Earth. We grew, increasingly rapidly, to 6bn in 1999, then to 7bn by the end of 2011. The projected 1.1bn rise between 2015 and 2030 is expected to swell most urban areas outside Europe by around 15 per cent. These averages deceive, in as much as they do not adequately represent places where populations will either shrink to leave unoccupied housing or, alternatively, increase remarkably. Indeed, the Australian capital of the state of Victoria, Melbourne, is expected to double its population to 8 million by 2050 from 4 million in 2012.°

The challenge is not simply one of fitting in more residents on limited land. Mainstream housing in the Global North absorbs materials and energy in its construction and everyday operation, contributing significantly to resource depletion and global carbon emissions. Settlements on coastal fringes and wholesale clearance of woodlands and forests have impacted heavily on animal habitats. In contrast to human increases, since 1970 populations of other vertebrate species have diminished by more than 50 per cent? The WWE 2014 Living Planet Report shows that our ecological footprint (the area required to supply the ecological goods and services we use) has increasingly over-reached the earth's regenerative biocapacity since the mid-1970s.° So much so that, by the mid-2010s, we were regularly consuming 50 per cent more than the earth could replenish. More disturbingly, the 2016 Living Planet Report indicates that, if we follow current trends we will exceed Earth’s regenerative capacity by around 75 per cent as soon as 2020.°

There are strong direct and indirect connections between housing and the over-use of Earth’s resources. In 2010, all types of buildings worldwide accounted for 32 per cent of total global final energy use, contributing significantly to global warming - a development which not only threatens multiple ecological systems across the globe but also makes the future of the human species uncertain.” The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has warned that increasing population, urbanisation and development threatens even more deleterious impacts in the future. Yet the IPCC also signals significant potential for reducing energy used in both the construction and use of residential building. Feasible low-cost achievements rely on compliance with strengthening government standards to improve building codes for construction and retrofits, policymakers attending to effective urban infrastructure and planning, and multiple voluntary lifestyle changes. How we house ourselves, live in our houses, and go to work and other daily activities, all have potential to significantly reduce carbon dioxide emissions and global climate change.

MANAGING OUR FUTURE TO BE ‘SMALL’ AND ‘SUSTAINABLE’

Given that we are struggling with affordability and breaching environmental limits, this book explores future directions of housing and household consumption towards more compact and shared lifestyles to enhance both social and natural environments alike. Through decades of experimentation, activist-residents, community-oriented policymakers and non-government organisations have developed successful and enduring models. Small Is Necessary examines the benefits and challenges of creating smaller and more efficient living spaces using various collaborative housing models, such as cohousing, ecovillages and communal housing in cities, suburbs, peri-urban fringes and regional areas. All such models refer to households that share building and outside spaces and facilities in self-managed ways.

The book’s title develops on a rich lineage. The classic Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered by ‘E. F (Ernst Friedrich) or ‘Fritz’ Schumacher was originally published in 1973 (London: Blond & Briggs) and argued the environmental efficiencies of modest lifestyles for sustainability. Several years later, in 1981, George McRobie’s Small Is Possible (New York City: HarperCollins) offered a variety of small operations and appropriate technologies to illustrate Schumacher’s ideas in action. Much later, in 2008, Lyle Estill sketched another practical, economic and spatial dimension in Small Is Possible: Life in a Local Economy (Gabriola Island: New Society Publishers). Similar to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company) the emphasis in Small Is Necessary: Shared Living on a Shared Planet is on avoiding the consequences of business-as-usual peril.

Clearly, any focus on sustainable housing and lifestyles must engage with the broader social, economic and environmental contexts for sustainable household practices. Therefore, in this book, I ascribe to Edwards’ and Hyett’s simple and constructive definition of the contested term ‘sustainable housing’ as ‘housing that creates sustainable communities in a resource-efficient manner.“ Notwithstanding the criticism of Guy and Moore - regarding Edwards’ and Hyett’s rather technical approach to sustainable housing - taken on its face value, this definition encompasses environmental and social aspects at a neighbourhood scale, and focuses holistically on broad-scale social and material contexts where local cultures and government policies can encourage and maintain sustainable practices.* The term ‘sustainable communities’ emphasises inter-generational and reproductive aspects, as well as local economies and cultures. Beyond a state that an individual or household might attain alone, say by purchasing or retrofitting their home and garden appropriately and adopting more environmentally efficient practices, the concept of sustainable communities appreciates sustainable housing in a dynamic context of conjoined socio-cultural, political and economic environments that establish and maintain sustainable practices in holistic ways.

HOW COMPACT AND HOW COMMUNAL?

In contrast to the economic interest of residential developers and the building sector to sell bigger houses to smaller households in suburbs and shoebox apartments in skyscrapers to investors who charge exorbitant rents, Small Is Necessary discusses the contradictions and challenges posed by current and future needs for shared and compact living. Iam a critical advocate asking, for instance, whether high-density inner-urban living, as touted by many government policymakers, really does achieve a smaller ecological footprint than more collaborative suburban models. Similarly, I engage with debates on small and shared housing that historically separated many social and environmental movements.

The traditional left response to urban overcrowding and substandard housing was to call on the state to provide affordable individualised housing. This line failed, first, as many governments post-Second World War tended to respond by developing bureaucratically run public monuments that were neither friendly, aesthetic nor well-integrated. Second, under the influence of neoliberalism later in the twentieth century, states withdrew from direct provisioning of housing as part of cost-cutting and privatisation measures. Moreover, the traditional party and union-based left clashed in organisational ways with the diverse and growing ‘alternative movements’ emphases on agency, collectivism, self-sufficiency and squatting - experimenting with models of alternative lifestyles, including communal living, creating alternative technologies and techniques for building, supplying energy and water, and dealing with waste, and self-provisioning for food and clothing. If these ‘alternative’ forms of living have become more central to a sustainable future, the traditional left maintains strong positions in asking central questions around the line between modest and sufficient housing, and cramped, noisy and insecure shelter.

Various models of collaborative housing are examined in this book, from non-relatives owning a house together and sharing their lives as a household unit, through to ecovillages that can include thousands of residents. A key question across all models focuses on preserving privacy and individuality. Despite the challenges of making such models work, I argue that collaborative housing can offer social support for young and old, singles and families alike, while providing environments where sharing networks and local cooperation can flourish. Shared housing encourages sharing knowledge and skills, addressing a neighbour's problem cooperatively, rather than individualistically ignoring or competing against them, say through conspicuous consumption. Teasing out all the environmental and human factors that contribute to more sociable, liveable and sustainable neighbourhoods, Small Is Necessary develops a practical framework for assessing what works best in different contexts, to satisfy different needs and achieve the most appropriate solutions for residents.

Small and shared living is a sensibility and art practised in appropriately built, or altered built, environments within rural and city landscapes that remind us that we belong to planet Earth. Small and shared living depends on skills and knowledge that develop and balance our needs for gregarious sociality and privacy. Small and shared living is about a modest haven, fondly called ‘home; socialising in streetscapes and ‘greenscapes’ nearby, working at home or in a conveniently located shared office space, where - thanks to the Internet and cloud storage — the world is our oyster.

Imagine a room of one’s own in a household where facilities and living spaces inside and out are shared, along with tending and harvesting from a collective food garden. Small and shared is about well-planned neighbourhoods and good public transport, which ease the frustrations and irritations of everyday working and socialising. It’s about choices, greater equality and connectivity between us, and a more sustainable balance with nature.

‘That’s the sales pitch? I hear you sigh. “What about the shambolic, crowded and dirty joint household I lived in when I was a student? To avoid all the conflicts and mess, I spent as much time as possible at friends’ houses and dreamt of a flat of my own or a house big enough for a family to share with my soul-mate. I don’t want anyone telling me what to do in my own home. Coliving sucks!’

This is where personal skills and community knowledge about coliving and collaborative housing are essential. Its why community-minded residents, architects, developers, builders, policymakers, regulators, public service providers, businesspeople, funders and financiers need to develop joint visions and processes for establishing built and social environments that incubate and facilitate modest collaborate living. In cultures of small and shared living, environmental efficiency is the norm or ideal, and space is convivial. Residents accept household principles about who uses what, when and how - and benefit from joint cleaning and cooking schedules. Mutual support and care is at hand. The neighbourhood is planned for private and group activities. Noise and pets are controlled. When people have differences that interfere with what they each want, they problem-solve for win-win results.