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Housing for Degrowth: Principles, Models, Challenges and Opportunities

Authors:
Anitra Nelson at University of Melbourne
Anitra Nelson
Francois Schneider at Recherche & Décroissance
Francois Schneider
  • Recherche & Décroissance
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Abstract

‘Degrowth’, a type of ‘postgrowth’, is becoming a strong political, practical and cultural movement for downscaling and transforming societies beyond capitalist growth and non-capitalist productivism to achieve global sustainability and satisfy everyone’s basic needs. This groundbreaking collection on housing for degrowth addresses key challenges of unaffordable, unsustainable and anti-social housing today, including going beyond struggles for a 'right to the city' to a 'right to metabolism', advocating refurbishment versus demolition, and revealing controversies within the degrowth movement on urbanisation, decentralisation and open localism. International case studies show how housing for degrowth is based on sufficiency and conviviality, living a ‘one planet lifestyle’ with a common ecological footprint. This book explores environmental, cultural and economic housing and planning issues from interdisciplinary perspectives such as urbanism, ecological economics, environmental justice, housing studies and policy, planning studies and policy, sustainability studies, political ecology, social change and degrowth. It will appeal to students and scholars across a wide range of disciplines. See more here — https://www.routledge.com/Housing-for-Degrowth-Principles-Models-Challenges-and-Opportunities/Nelson-Schneider/p/book/9781138558052
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April 2018 draft
1
Housing for Degrowth: Principles, Models, Challenges and Opportunities
Edited by Anitra Nelson and François Schneider
Routledge-Earthscan — Environmental Humanities Series
Forthcoming — late 2018/early 2019
Contents
Lists of Figures, Tables and Boxes
Foreword
Joan Martinez-Alier
Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
List of contributors
I. Simple Living for All
1. Housing for growth narratives
Anitra Nelson
2. Housing for degrowth narratives
François Schneider
II. Housing Justice
3. From the ‘right to the city’ to the ‘right to metabolism’
Elisabeth Skarðhamar Olsen, Marco Orefice and Giovanni Pietrangeli
4. How can squatting contribute to degrowth?
Claudio Cattaneo
III. Housing Sufficiency
5. Rethinking home as a node for transition
Pernilla Hagbert
6. Framing degrowth: The radical potential of tiny house mobility
April Anson
7. Housing and climate change resilience: Vanuatu —
Wendy Christie and John Salong
April 2018 draft
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IV. Reducing Demand
8. Christiania: A poster child for degrowth?
Natasha Verco
9. Refurbishment vs demolition? Social housing campaigning for degrowth
Mara Ferreri
10. The Simpler Way: Housing, living and settlements
Ted Trainer
V. Ecological Housing and Planning
11. Degrowth: A perspective from Bengaluru, South India
Chitra Vishwanath
12. Low impact living: More than a house
Jasmine Dale, Robin Marwege and Anja Humburg
13. Neighbourhoods as the basic module of the global commons
Hans Widmer (‘P.M.’) with Francois Schneider
14. The quality of small dwellings in a neighbourhood context
Harpa Stefansdottir and Jin Xue
VI. Whither Urbanisation?
15. Housing for degrowth: Space, planning and distribution
Jin Xue
16. Urbanisation as the death of politics: Sketches of degrowth municipalism
Aaron Vansintjan
17. Scale, place and degrowth: Getting from here to ‘there’ — On Xue and Vansintjan I
Andreas Exner
18. Geography matters: Ideas for a degrowth spatial planning paradigm — On Xue and
Vansintjan II
Karl Krähmer
19. ‘Open localism’ — On Xue and Vansintjan III
François Schneider and Anitra Nelson
VII. Anti-Capitalist Values and Relations
20. Mietshäuser Syndikat: Collective ownership, the ‘housing question’ and degrowth
Lina Hurlin
21. Non-monetary eco-collaborative living for degrowth
Anitra Nelson
22. Summary and research futures for housing for degrowth
Anitra Nelson and François Schneider
... Drawing on the Dutch movements of old, grassroots counter-plans were developed. They did not stop at bike plans, but made counter-policies that placed inclusivity at the core of food (Artmann and Sartison, 2018;Roberts and Geels, 2019;Lacy, 2000), housing (Nelson and Schneider, 2018;Durning, 2021;Geissel, 2022;Koch, 2022;Bua and Bussu, 2023), work (Lacy, 2000;Weeks, 2011;Clark, 2019), and energy (Burke, 2018;Riofrancos, 2020;Sarnow and Tiedemann, 2022;Sovacool et al, 2023). As the popularity of these grew, councils began adopting them -or stepping up with their own initiatives. ...
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