You’ve heard of the Tiny House movement, but what about the tiny apartment movement? Access to affordable housing is a problem in cities around the world, particularly but not exclusively for the young. One of the market solutions offered up in the face of this market crisis has been termed “micro-living.”
According to the British Property Federation, the trade association of the UK real estate sector, micro-living is defined as “‘self-contained living spaces,’ purpose built co-living developments, and converted and subdivided shared living spaces.” Geographers Ella Harris and Mel Nowicki, who quote this definition, explore micro-living as “a reworking of what constitutes” an ideal home and as the normalization of the precarity facing those searching for a place to live in cities.
Harris and Nowicki themselves define micro-living as “living spaces that don’t conform to current minimum space standards.” Minimum space requirements vary since they are locally defined. The authors write that in both New York City and London the standard is about 37 square meters for one person in a one-bedroom unit. The first micro-housing development in New York was just under that, with units of 33.5 square meters.
Developments in Paris and Barcelona have gone down to as low as 2.4 square meters, akin to the capsule/pod hotels that originated in Japan and have since popped up elsewhere. (For comparison’s sake, a king-sized bed has an area of just about 4 square meters.)
The idea and practice of micro-living have been expanding and is now “a feature of housing economies in cities including London, New York, Buenos Aires, Hong Kong, Dublin, Paris, Perth, and Vancouver,” note Harris and Nowicki. In other words, micro-living has popped up wherever “affordable housing has become a chronic issue.” It’s become a nexus of cool and profit-making for development companies and property owners.
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This just get smaller imperative comes within the context of “rising pressure on stakeholders to find solutions but, simultaneously, persistent opposition to housing models that contest the neoliberal logics which prioritize housing’s financialization.” Micro-living is thus a product of “shrinking expectations, and co-opting anti-capitalist collective housing models to fit post-austerity neoliberal models seeking the highest profit at the cost of secure, suitable homes.”
As such, micro-living fits in well with Harris and Nowicki’s earlier analysis of precarity, which has in recent years “emerged as a key concept in social and political sciences.” The idea of precarity stems from “political theorists such as Judith Butler and Lauren Berlant” and “distinguishes between precariousness, an inherent state of vulnerability and dependence resulting from the relational structure of society, and precarity, a political condition that is the consequence of uneven power relations and refers to the precariousness of some subjects compared to others.”
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Harris and Nowicki argue that micro-living also increases the “blurring of home-work spacetimes and the normalization of precarious labour conditions.” It “reimagines diminished housing conditions as aspirational,” something hip and cool, the perfect “trend” fodder for social media. It’s another piece of “austerity chic,” sold or branded as “innovative, flexible, and entrepreneurial,” glorifying those who have to cram together—while acreages of high-rises remain empty as the investments of billionaires who live elsewhere.
“Rather than a housing crisis solution, micro-living solidifies many of its issues […] rather than helping young adults to access affordable independent housing, it offers models that naturalise the stunted lifeworlds of the housing crisis, by extending student-style accommodation into adult housing markets.”
