The Growing Trend of Living Small

By Ella Harris Tim White Mel Nowicki

The Growing Trend of Living Small: A Critical Approach to Shrinking Domesticities - Edited Collection

Building on our work in Austin and my previous work on micro housing in London, myself, Mel and Tim are producing an edited collection on The Growing Trend of Living Small for Routledge's 'Home' Series.

The book will be the first critical investigation of shrinking domestic spaces, bringing together the work of academics working on small living spaces across Europe, North America and Australasia in order to understand what micro-living, tiny homes and other kinds of small domestic spaces branded as aspirational are bringing to our societies, and what they may be eroding.

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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.

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.

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.

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