Tracey Harris, the Tiny House Movement: Challenging our Consumer Culture
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Tracey Harris, the Tiny House Movement: Challenging our Consumer Culture Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2018, (ISBN: 9781498557450) Price $85 (hardback). 138 pages Daniel J. Ingram 1 Accepted: 20 October 2020 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
In the global West, it is often professed that having more is better. This is particularly true for our built environment—the houses that we live in and the ones that we hope to buy in the future. While in many parts of the Western world the average size of houses is increasing and the average number of people residing in each house is decreasing, one movement challenges the logic and notion that bigger is better: the Tiny House Movement. In The Tiny House Movement: Challenging Our Consumer Culture, sociologist Tracy Harris explores the rationale of the Movement and the people involved. She begins by addressing the question of whether bigger is really better (Chapter 1) when it comes to the houses that we live in and our built environment. Harris discusses the structural biases in society that lead many towards overwork and hyper-consumerism, which she sees as a result of Western socialization that conditions us to consume for the good of the economy. Coupled with trends towards individualisation, these factors lead to larger houses being valued as better and more desirable. Yet housing prices are increasing, leading to increasing personal debt. Further, larger houses are often associated with environmental burdens such as increased land use, frequently encroaching available agricultural areas, greater demand for energy, and use of environmentally harmful building materials. On top of that, large houses need to be filled with relatively more furniture and belongings, which potentially contributes to greater amounts of unrecyclable waste. Harris argues the general ambition for people to earn exponentially more money year to year has led to decreased leisure time and impacts to overall health and wellbeing. As a result, some * Daniel J. Ingram [email protected] 1
Biological and Environmental Sciences, University of Stirling, Stirling FK9 4LA, UK
individuals have come to question this status quo and seek a different way of living, one defined by community, ecological mindfulness, housing security, and economic freedom. Much like a tiny house, this book is tiny, but mighty, suitable for both non-academic and academic readers, but will be of particular interest to those who are looking for a more sociological analysis of the tiny house movement. Readers of Human Ecology may be particularly interested in its contributions to an increased understanding of the socioecological and cultural factors that drive both the desire for a large house and the movement towards tiny houses. While this book is not an in-depth study of the environmental implications of the movement, which I personally would have liked to read more of, environmental sustainability and the possible ways in which the movement could help reduce environmental impacts is re
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