‘Home’ constitutes a key part of the everyday, providing a basis for our aspirations and visions of what kind of life we wish to lead and, by extension, what kind of society we construct. How we physically, socially and cognitively construct our home has significant implications for the social and environmental impact of residential development. The perspective in this chapter emphasises housing for degrowth – rejecting Western bourgeois and consumerist representations of home in favour of housing sufficiency. Alternative housing practices, with examples from Sweden, challenge a high-consuming culture of indebtedness and neoliberalisation of housing, reimagining home as a collaborative, decommodified and feminist engagement with people and place, and a node for transition to a low-impact society. Home can be a basis for autonomy, self-management, inclusion, a space for experimentation and reskilling, and for sharing both spaces and knowledge, a place for embracing the everyday as convivial and collaborative rather than segmented, gendered and hierarchic. The humble potential of home lies precisely in the cross-section between physical, social and cognitive constructs of ‘the goodlife’.
QC 20180905