Survival through design: An examination of tiny housing as a unique and emerging sector within self-build projects

This proposal seeks to explore what factors are influencing the increasing popularity of tiny house builds within the UK, with the specific purpose of interrogating their potential to be used in strategic housing policy implementation in Britain. The project will draw on the work of key thinkers in the field of alternative approaches to housing, such as Colin Ward, as well as more contemporary academics such as Michaela Benson. These writers both offer critiques of housing policy in Britain which will be invaluable for my own work. I will also incorporate Marxist critiques of the economic base in which these housing policies are located and formulated. Althusser and Gramsci, as well as work by Noam Chomsky will be important for the development of my ideas. The example set by Paul Chatterton and others involved in the creation and running of the Low Impact Living Affordable Community (LILAC) will serve as an excellent example of the kind of environmentally and socially responsible principles against which tiny housing can be compared.

My proposed doctoral research aims to address four key questions:

RQ1: Where do Tiny Housers' live in the UK, why do they become tiny housers', how do they do it, and how much does the average tiny house cost?
RQ2: In what ways are tiny houses becoming more popular, and what are the main factors driving this?
RQ3: How do issues of environmental justice, social justice, and economic principles such as a debt-as-standard policy towards housing affect trends within tiny housing?
RQ4: How could policy change/implementation take place to make Tiny House builds easier in the UK?

I will use a mixed methods approach in order to gather the most relevant data to answer the research questions as outlined above. Secondary data on demographic information of tiny house builders will be gathered, if available. This will include categories such as age, gender, relationship status, ethnicity, and income. It is possible that I will be relying on data collected about self-build projects more generally, since tiny housing is a niche and emerging category if its own under the self-build umbrella.

Further to this, primary data will be collected using semi-structured interviews to gather information on qualitative aspects of the building process, such as the reasoning that led informants to build, what values they feel tiny housing represents and so on. I will conduct semi-structured interviews with individuals from the following categories; potential tiny house builders, people who already live in tiny houses, builders/contractors of tiny houses, and government officials related to housing policy.