Small is Necessary

Shared Living on a Shared Planet

Anitra Nelson

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786802125
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Self Improvement

Does small mean less? Not necessarily. In an era of housing crises, environmental unsustainability and social fragmentation, the need for more sociable, affordable and sustainable housing is vital. The answer? Shared living - from joint households to land-sharing, cohousing and ecovillages. Using successful examples from a range of countries, Anitra Nelson shows how 'eco-collaborative housing' - resident-driven low impact living with shared facilities and activities - can address the great social, economic and sustainability challenges that householders and capitalist societies face today. Sharing living spaces and facilities results in householders having more amenities and opportunities for neighbourly interaction. Small is Necessary places contemporary models of 'alternative' housing and living at centre stage arguing that they are outward-looking, culturally rich, with low ecological footprints and offer governance techniques for a more equitable and sustainable future.

PART I

Compact Urban Housing

2

Once We Were Small:
Traditional and Contemporary Homes

In conversation and popular culture, ‘home’ is associated with a haven, privacy, comfort, kin and mutual support.¹ A home might be inherited and represent ties of kinship. A house might be lovingly, or for solely practical reasons, owner-built. A tenant might feel either insecure and resentful or secure and grateful. Owner-occupiers’ houses co-exist as a use value, a dwelling, and as an asset, for renting out or for potential sale. Most significantly, in terms of mobility (say migration or moves driven by aspiration), notions of home assume complex associations beyond the ‘house’ and ‘family’ to encompass neighbourhoods, towns, regions, even nations, adopted homes or lost ‘homelands’. In these senses, home is both a landscape and a belonging to community. In short, the house as a ‘home’ is a socio-material concept inseparable from ‘household’ and set in wider spatial, socio-economic and cultural contexts.

This chapter focuses on select developments over the last few centuries as the production and experience of home reflected the rise of capitalism in the United Kingdom (UK), Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand (NZ). In this process home morphed from a workspace to a place of respite and diversions from work except, of course, for the ‘housewife’ who busily maintained the home and household. The house succumbed to capitalist production processes, becoming a commodity and asset whether built by small or large building companies as a one-off spec home, as one amongst many in a housing estate, or as a unit in a multi-storey housing block. Many urbanites opted for life in a detached or semi-detached house in suburbs. Over the past century, demographic changes in household composition and size have influenced, interacted and clashed with developments in house styles, floor plans and house sizes. Most houses supplied on the market are environmentally unsustainable, many are unaffordable for people on average (let alone low) incomes, and perpetuate alienation rather than encourage genuine community in authentic neighbourhoods.

In short, under significant economic, environmental and social challenges, the home has been subject to competing pressures and ideals and now presents a challenge. This chapter explores this evolution, avoiding generic topics associated with apartments (treated in Chapter 3) or sustainability-specific changes in the interiors of apartments and dwellers’ practices within and beyond their apartments (Chapter 4). In the context of the argument for smaller and shared housing, this chapter shows how the size of dwellings has grown very quickly in a relatively short period of time. More modest living had been much more the norm during the last few centuries of human history. Similarly, history shows larger and more varied households than are seen to be typical in the Global North today. In short, such historical characteristics are closer than contemporary mainstream housing and lifestyles to the ideals and practices of smaller and shared living ‘alternatives’ explored in later parts of this book.

WORK, HOUSEHOLDS AND HOUSE SIZE

In pre-industrial times, able household members worked sociably at, around or from home. Industrialisation relocated work away from homes that would, instead, turn into units of consumption, education and clean domesticity. Just as private housework was generally performed by women and servants, the productive cash economy was dominated by men. Data from New York City (NYC) shows a climb in numbers of men working away from home from fewer than 5 per cent in 1800, to 20 per cent by 1820, and 70 per cent by 1840.² While this level of change was neither as swift nor uniform across most regions and countries, housing everywhere would become an appendage to commercial activities, which reorganised expectations and obligations between couples, and parents and their children. For housewives, homes were productive-cum-consumptive units as they cared for household members, cleaned the house, provided meals, laundered and mended clothes – making home and work synonymous. In contrast, for household members working outside home, it became a place of relaxation, leisure and pleasure. Meanwhile, social changes associated with rising capitalist classes and power impacted differentially on house sizes, space, use and location.

The ‘family’ household

In The Making of Home, Judith Flanders argues that the romantic leitmotif myth of a traditional tight-knit nuclear or extended family was prompted by disconcerting conditions attending the rise of capitalism, industrialisation and urbanisation. In reality, for centuries families were mobile and mixed affairs, losing and adopting (especially young) members because of deaths and cohabiting with other families. ‘Family’ gatherings at Christmas, marriage and funerals meant community as well as kin. In short, the ‘image of a family of the past gathered together around a dinner table was a novelty of modernity, and of plenty’ rather than historical reality.³

Similarly, a Canadian study across the twentieth century data shows that the percentage of children living with both parents was highest relatively recently, in 1961 (94 per cent). A similar number of children lived in single-parent families in 1931 (12 per cent) as in 1981 (13 per cent), although most often with a widowed parent in 1931 and a separated one in 1981. In 2011, 11 per cent of Canadians aged up to 24 years lived in blended (or step-) families.⁴ In 2011, a mere 9 per cent of family households contained non-immediate family members while 31 per cent had done so in 1901. Clearly the ‘family’ household has never been either as complete or as cohesively kin as popular culture and contemporary politicians suggest.

However, Flanders does argue that, for a few centuries, a relatively exclusive nuclear family unit did become relatively normal across north-western Europe, with its women, children and household workers subservient to a male head. Meanwhile, in most other areas of Europe and its colonies, single adults lived in various multi-nuclear and extended-family households based on kinship, cultural norms and practicality. In the nineteenth century, single rooms in boarding houses or lodgings also became respectable homes for singles and young couples in Britain and the United States (US).⁵ Furthermore, it was not unusual to find houses, rooms and beds shared by family members and visitors. Of greatest significance to our study here, people shared living, eating and sleeping spaces, which were often relatively small.

The English house of the nineteenth century

An income above £150 per annum identified middle-class English family households during the first half of the nineteenth century and, by mid-century, Burnett estimates that one in six English people comprised this ‘tier of middle classes’.⁶ Middle-class homes were located away from workplaces and their pollution, generally had at least six rooms, and were bigger households than working-class ones partly because they included servants, and separated public (male) from private (female) areas as well as family-only areas from activities involving deliveries and door-to-door salespeople.⁷ Gendered spheres determined household experiences and practices.⁸ The genteel housewife made the home an antidote to the challenges, threats and alienation of commercial production; home was for intimacy, relaxation, religiosity, care, cleanliness and nurture.

While middle-class households reflected managerial male authority in the workplace, urban geography highlighted the capitalist class divide. Working-class tenements and boarding houses in Britain’s industrial cities were close to their polluting workplaces, overcrowded, noisy, under-ventilated and dank, with communal water and toilets clustered in courtyards. In the mid-nineteenth century, one working-class area of Leeds had more than 200 dwellings occupied by an average of 11 people per dwelling and more than two residents for every bed (beds and bedding were expensive). Even ‘back-to-backs’, replacing slums in the nineteenth century, had just a few rooms and three shared-party walls, with ‘privies’ and standpipes – along with their users – exposed to a courtyard or the street.⁹ Similarly in the US, by 1900, two-thirds of the residents of NYC (2.3 million out of a total of 3.4 million) lived in pokey, dank tenements with poor facilities that had a negative impact on health and mortality rates.¹⁰ Some escaped in the following decades, as urban areas of the US were populated with small row houses of a few ‘public’ and ‘private’ rooms.¹¹

Although workers in nineteenth century Britain experienced tiny, crowded and poorly built housing, ‘back-to-backs’ – as in Figure 2.1 – were of a higher standard than the rural labourer’s cottage. Many benefitted from courtyard spaces where residents shared toilets, water services, play areas and child-care. Based on 1851 England-wide data, revealed in an 1864 inquiry, Burnett suggests that the vast majority of residents lived in one or two-bedroom cottages where the average 7ft (2.13m) height and 10ft by 10ft (3.05m by 3.05m) bedroom would bed four or five people.¹² Meanwhile, European house-building practices inspired tiny single-storey structures of one room built in colonial settlements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Later, such modest structures were extended, renovated and replaced with larger houses and more rooms. Subdivision created the ‘bedroom’, which was ‘largely an invention of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries’.¹³

Figure 2.1 Birmingham (UK) back-to-backs

Source: ©National Trust Images/Robert Morris, Image ref 153032

‘Overcrowding’, meaning two members per room over 10 years of age – younger children counted as 0.5 – became the main criterion for assessing English housing when, in 1891, the measure of household members per room was substituted for one based on members per dwelling. Burnett characterises this as simply ‘a tolerant minimum’ given that it still ‘allowed a three-roomed house to contain two adults, four children and any number of babies without falling foul of the definition’.¹⁴ The inexact measure of a ‘room’ has persisted in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) statistics where vagaries in sizes of rooms, even the ‘average room’, endure. This is significant because the number of rooms per resident is the OECD proxy for levels of overcrowding; recent data suggest that the average dwelling in OECD member countries (and of Switzerland) offers 1.8 rooms per person.¹⁵

The English house of the twentieth century

If income determined space in English homes of the nineteenth century, its influence diminished in the twentieth century. The standard was raised to 1.5 occupants per room, one that almost 17 per cent of households failed in 1911, but fewer than 3 per cent did in 1961. Once more than one member per room signified overcrowding, in 1971, the proportion falling short of that standard soon dropped from 6 per cent to 3 per cent, in 1981. Of course, aver...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures, Tables and Boxes
• Abbreviations
• Glossary
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Compact Urban Housing
• Part II Eco-cohousing and Ecovillages
• Part III Futures: Scaling Up, Shared Landscapes, Shared Livelihoods
• Conclusion