Shrinking Domesticities Global Seminar Series: Final Event

By Ella Harris Mel Nowicki Tim White

20^th October 2023

Our Urban Studies Seminar Series “Shrinking Domesticities: Towards a Global Research Agenda” officially came to an end on 9th October, culminating in a final online event. While we were sad to reach the finish line of a fantastic string of seminars (as well as to run out of reasons to visit interesting and warm places!) our gloom was tempered by our excitement for what the future might hold with the brilliant network of global scholars formed across these events.

The online seminar brought together speakers from our three events in Johannesburg, Buenos Aires and Tokyo, as well as other scholars from the UK and Europe interested in shrinking domestic space. Over twenty academic researchers and practitioners from governments and nonprofits joined us from countries including Japan, Bangladesh, Argentina, Bolivia, Columbia, South Africa, the UK and France, navigating language barriers and time zone challenges to take part in a summative discussion and exploration of future research agendas.

Working in breakout groups, participants discussed common themes emerging from the three events and added ideas to a Jamboard. Common themes identified included:

Gender and shrinking domestic space
The impact of shrinking domestic space on the life course
Design, materiality and its relationship to ‘spatial agency’
Shrinking domesticities as something both protested for and against
The relationship between shrinking domesticities and public space in the city
The relationship between shrinking domesticities and financialisation
Issues of freedom and agency

The Jamboard below shows more ideas and details.

In the second part of the online seminar participants worked again in breakout groups to share plans for future research in the area of shrinking domesticities. We discussed ambitions both modest and major and there was widespread enthusiasm for a book on small housing and its relationship to global challenges.

(See Jamboard image below for more details).

As an immediate next step, we’ve set up this directory of shrinking domesticities scholars so that the international community we have built through these events can stay in contact with one another and discuss future publication and grant collaborations.

We would like to thank the Urban Studies Foundation for funding this seminar series - we have found our exploration of global shrinking domestic space so enriching and thought-provoking, and are excited for the next phase of the project.

Watch this (growing!) space!

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Ella Harris

Ella Harris is a researcher and writer interested in 'crisis cultures', epistemically just creative methods and inventive knowledge exchange strategies. She is currently working on the project Story Arcs at Bath Spa University as the Narrative Exchange Champion as well as undertaking freelance research for clients including Natural England, Caring in Bristol and the Runnymede Trust.

Previously, Ella was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Geography Department at Birkbeck, University of London. Prior to this, she was an ESRC postdoctoral fellow in the Sociology Department at Goldsmiths, University of London. She's also worked as a research assistant in the Geography Department at Royal Holloway University on a collaborative project on pop-up social housing. She completed a PhD in Cultural Geography at Royal Holloway University in 2017.

Ella has published widely on subjects including the cultural geographies of precarity, pop-up culture, housing insecurity, immersive cinema and interactive documentary. Her book on pop-up culture is out now and her latest interactive documentary, about COVID-19 lockdown in London, can be found here.

Mel Nowicki

Mel Nowicki is a Senior Lecturer in Urban Geography at Oxford Brookes University. Broadly her research interests lie in housing inequality, precarity and the concept of home. Mel's research projects have included: understanding the impact of the criminalisation of squatting and the bedroom tax in London, experiences of family homelessness and temporary accommodation in London and Dublin, and the rise of Tiny Housing as a 'solution' to global housing crises. Mel has published work both in academic journals, national news websites, and in a policy context. Her forthcoming book, Bringing Home the Housing Crisis (Bristol Policy Press) brings together multiple strands of her research to consider how the concept of home is politicised in order to de-legitimise working-class and low-income people's rights to home.

Tim White

Tim White is a PhD candidate on the Cities Programme at LSE. His doctoral research examines the rise of the co-living sector - corporate shared housing for young professionals - and he has undertaken work in London, Berlin and San Francisco looking at the production and consumption of this phenomenon. Prior to starting his PhD, Tim worked as a researcher at LSE Cities.

Tim is interested in how cities are reshaped by money and power, particularly at the intersection of housing, finance and technology. Prior to and alongside his PhD, he has worked on a number of research projects, including: understanding the experience of high-density housing in London, exploring the Tiny House phenomenon in Texas, and reviewing international policy on foreign property ownership. His work has been published in a range of academic and non-academic contexts, including Urban Geography and The Guardian.

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