Contested subjectivities in a UK housing cooperative: old hippies and Thatcher’s children negotiating the commons

(Tiny) spaces of hope: Reclaiming, maintaining, and reframing housing in the tiny house movement

“…Rather, Ward reiterates Samuel Smiles' maxim that 'the duty of helping oneself in the highest sense involves helping one's neighbours' (Smiles, 1866). Again, we can find echoes of this in recent work about alternative approaches to housing, in which individual and communal efforts to improve housing conditions co-exist and reinforce each other (Arbell et al, 2020;Huron, 2015;Nelson and Chatterton, 2022).…”

“…The absence of landlords, for example, means residents must make their own repairs to their housing. Thus, Arbell et al. (2020) suggest that in such circumstances people become active participants in rather than passive consumers of housing.…”

“…Through their concrete everyday experiences, people build their collective confidence, and the personal thus becomes political (Gibson-Graham, 2006; Sitanen et al., 2015). Self-help approaches to housing thereby challenge capitalism by default, even when the people involved do not articulate this in politically radical ways (Arbell et al., 2020). The tiny house movement is of particular interest here because it enables us to trace this journey through which the personal becomes political (Shearer and Burton, 2021).…”

“…The wider institutional context remains crucial: Even where alternatives emerge in radical opposition to the state, they still need to navigate its apparatus (Lang and Stoeger, 2018;Nelson and Chatterton, 2022). For example, in taking advantage of public funding, cooperatives may open up opportunities but also potentially restrict the agency of their members (Aernouts and Ryckewaert, 2019;Arbell et al, 2020;Vasudevan, 2011). The uncertain planning status of tiny houses complicates their relationship with authorities, while their diminutive size renders their occupants dependent on others for basic services that many would take for granted, such as storage and laundry (Alexander, 2019).…”

“…The absence of landlords, for example, means residents must make their own repairs to their housing. Thus, Arbell et al (2020) suggest that in such circumstances people become active participants in rather than passive consumers of housing. This focus on housingas-process captures the material practices involved, which integrate people, physical space, and knowledge (Bresnihan and Byrne, 2015).…”