Resistance is fertile: exploring tiny house practices in Australia

ABSTRACT For many Australians, the current crisis in housing affordability and availability has created an impasse in relation to the dream of home ownership. Having begun in America in the 1990s and emerged relatively recently in Australia, the tiny house movement is largely positioned as a direct response to this crisis. Currently, there is little research on the motivations of those in the movement who are living in a tiny house on wheels (or THOW) or other unregulated tiny house options. Based on a qualitative multi-methodological study involving a number of Australian tiny house dwellers, builders and advocates, this paper examines Australian tiny housing trends like the THOW that are outside of current regulations, focusing on how they are lived and experienced among obvious grey areas in current planning, building and housing codes. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, it draws on multiple conceptual perspectives to open out a discussion that moves beyond affordability and availability discourses to argue that such tiny house trends also represent different resistant and spatialising practices within the dominant housing model, creating politically autonomous zones. Offering a novel morphology of informal architecture, I further suggest that these resistant practices invite the development of different planning approaches and practices.