Image: Aeronautpix / Canva
In postwar London, the sci-fi writer J.G. Ballard looked into the future and what he saw was bleak. While his peers fantasised about space exploration and chrome-gilded techno-utopias, Ballard foresaw a new millennium ravaged by the very technologies humankind was scrambling to create. Throughout the 1960s and 70s the so-called ‘Seer of Shepperton’ catapulted readers into sometimes violent, always grim futures. In one, a bougie London apartment block degenerates into depravity as its affluent residents turn on each other; in another, a new widower moves to an island formerly used as a nuclear testing site, and spends the rest of his days wandering amidst the radioactive ruins.
Today Ballard is best-known for his more lurid works—the controversial novel Crash, or the experimental short fiction collection The Atrocity Exhibition—but the boring dystopias of his earlier writings are in many ways more interesting. The characters are less one-dimensional, the settings less stylised, and the tales therefore more relatable—and more ominous.
This is certainly the case with his 1961 short story ‘Billennium’, a gloomy rumination on housing scarcity that could well have been written in 2021. Overpopulation has thrown a future city into chaos: footpaths regularly come to hours-long standstills with foot traffic jams, and people compete within a cut-throat real estate market where shortage is addressed through absurd, ruthless pragmatism. All residential buildings are subdivided into rooms, which in turn are subdivided into cubicles no bigger than four square metres for individuals or six square metres for couples. Big enough for only a single bed and a suitcase, the cubicles are arranged in a joyless grid replicated endlessly across storeys and buildings.
The sameness of each tiny home or micro-apartment can evoke a sense of claustrophobia.
Sixty years on, the living arrangements of ‘Billennium’ seem less absurd and more, albeit faintly, inevitable. The pragmatism behind Ballard’s ‘housing batteries’ is reproduced in twenty-first century reality, where homes and apartments are fast shrinking. From 22-square-metre micro-apartments to boarding houses and shipping container homes, diminutive domiciles are increasingly marketed as the solution to the twin crises of urban housing affordability and sustainability. The marketing machine has many components—sleek property development websites, coffee table books, YouTube channels with millions of followers—all of which are carefully calibrated to present tiny homes as the ideal of modern domestic bliss.
A tidy Japandi aesthetic and plywood panels that inventively unfurl to reveal furniture mean the idea is, at first, an easy sell. But eventually the sameness of each tiny home or micro-apartment—the unadorned timber panels, the bed tucked into an inconvenient location, the strange and tiny staircases—can evoke a sense of claustrophobia. There is the feeling that, as Ballard writes: ‘Someone timid of his rights could be literally squeezed out of existence.’
*
In Jia Tolentino’s 2019 essay ‘Always Be Optimizing’, she describes the contemporary preoccupation with efficiency in all aspects of our lives. Each of us is enrolled, she writes, in the ‘amoral project of learning to get better at life under accelerated capitalism.’ As the planet falls apart and economic insecurity spreads, being ‘better at life’ in most cases means doing more with less: making more money with less effort, starting more side hustles with less time, acquiring more stuff with less environmental impact.
Under late-stage capitalism, marketable anxiety around sustainability means that to be a good consumer is to desire less—but to desire nonetheless. Like ‘every public-facing demand’, Tolentino muses, pressure to be a good consumer ‘escalates into perpetuity’. Whether we’re stressing about our carbon footprint or shopping for a sustainable wardrobe, many of us have internalised an obsession with ‘buying better’. Diminutive dwellings tap into this obsession.
As the planet falls apart and economic insecurity spreads, being ‘better at life’ in most cases means doing more with less.
With some variations, the marketing thrust behind most micro-apartment and tiny house projects is the same. The pitch seems like common sense: less waste, less resource consumption, and less physical space mean more affordability and therefore more for everyone. It’s a masterstroke of marketing that, like the grift of ‘carbon footprints’, places responsibility for solving global ecological and economic crises on everyday people—rather than the capital class exacerbating said crises everyday. Even if it was possible to set profit motives aside, the relationship between density and sustainability is not linear. A 2017 study published in the International Journal of High-Rise Buildings, for example, found that high density downtown apartments consumed ‘virtually the same’ operational energy per square metre as detached suburban dwellings, and had a third more embodied energy.
Presenting small homes as a not only viable but desirable response to housing affordability and the climate emergency obscures the simple bottom line: the smaller the dwelling, the more fit on a plot of land; the more dwellings on a plot of land, the bigger the profit. In a settler colony founded on extracting as much value as possible from stolen land, developers and governments alike follow this logic.
https://twitter.com/tira_tira_tira/status/1275547809568047105
In New South Wales alone, the state government has redeveloped dozens of public housing estates over the past 20 years, totalling thousands of affordable homes. In most cases existing tenants—many of whom have called these estates home for years—are turfed out, while often perfectly viable housing is demolished and smaller, higher-density dwellings erected in its place. Increased density, the neoliberal argument goes, is a net gain that absolves the sale of public assets and destruction of entire communities these estate redevelopments entail.
Yet the housing affordability crisis plaguing Australian cities isn’t merely a matter of physical supply shortage. Micro-apartments won’t make the affordability problem go away: while they’re significantly smaller than most, they’re not actually cheaper to live in. In Sydney, for example, rent for micro-apartments by UKO starts at $450 a week and at $560 for a 23- to 28-square metre ‘comfort studio’ by Zuu Living—both well above the $325 median for a similar bedsit in NSW. Even as developers race to build the smallest, densest dwellings possible, tiny homes alone won’t solve the housing crisis so long as dollar-hungry developers, price-gouging landlords, rampant wage suppression, and insidious policies—from both sides of politics—favouring developers and investors over residents remain.
Novel, abundant, and easily marketable, smaller dwellings might not be the silver bullet to the many entwined problems of our present—but they are the perfect product, optimised for our time.
*
Like sci-fi authors, architects have long been fascinated with the future and what it might hold. Formerly this fascination manifested itself in weird and wonderful ways: the sinew and spikes of Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, the angularity of Anton Sant’Elia’s super structures—brutalism before Brutalism—and the parasitic terror of Lebbeus Woods’ sci-fi sketches.
The tradition lives on today, with one crucial distinction. Growing commercial pressures make it impractical for architects to engage in speculative image creation that merely expresses their own, idiosyncratic dreaming. Instead, this practice has been extended to embody collective dreams. Modern architectural renders, photomontages, and project descriptions are themselves speculative fictions that help make the fantasy of collective living, high density dwellings, and tiny apartments not only tangible but also desirable.
View this post on Instagram
Once said spaces are actually built, the media arm of the built environment profession grasps the baton and sprints to really sell them. Design blogs, easily digestible listicles, and plenty of design competitions dedicated to micro-apartments and tiny homes all play a key role in transforming compact, claustrophobic living into a covetable way of life. Meanwhile other—less profitable—small abodes remain stigmatised: caravan parks are still considered a ‘last resort’ by many and public housing towers are still deemed moral panic-inflected ‘housing hell’.
Even architects themselves are recruited as props to sell the dream of tiny homes and smooth over any nightmarish aspects. Press images often present architects as the embodiment of aspirant, ascetic efficiency: often slim, always stylish, typically dressed in black or other muted colours with little ornamentation. Even when they’re enabling the sale of a former public housing unit for a sickening $35 million, they’re above the fray and exude an admirable air of chic, non-partisan aloof. Unlike the unnamed architects in ‘Billennium’, today’s architects don’t want to force you to live in a tiny, statutorily-constrained box. They want you to choose to do so.
Today’s architects don’t want to force you to live in a tiny, statutorily-constrained box. They want you to choose to do so.
But faced with aggressively accelerated capitalism and a worsening housing crisis, is it even a choice at all? As Tolentino puts it: ‘It’s so much easier, when we gain agency, to use it to adapt rather than to oppose.’ Arguably, everyday people squeezing their lives into smaller and smaller homes as the rich (who apparently don’t subscribe to the tiny house philosophy themselves) continue to collect properties is more adaptation than opposition. And, as Tolentino observes wryly, ‘Nothing today ever de-escalates.’ By the logic of tiny homes, where smaller is more novel and the more novel the better, the aspiration inevitably becomes to live in a series of boxes that progressively shrink until you’re buried in the smallest one.
At the end of Billenium, the protagonists stumble upon a hidden room with a comparatively expansive floor space of 15 square metres. Suffocated by their previous living arrangements, they at first rejoice, then begin inviting friends and family members to share their spacious new living quarters. Once everyone has moved in, they use curtains and partitions to subdivide the space themselves.
*
Regardless of its size, ‘home’ is—for most of us—more than a functional box. That home is a space for more than just shelter in the strictest sense of the word is something every variation of diminutive domicile overlooks. In a recent article about boarding and rooming houses, Leo Patterson Ross of the Tenants’ Union NSW asks: ‘Would you intentionally design a type of home that is so small and offers such a poor experience that it counts as a form of homelessness?’ A home, he explains, is ‘more than somewhere to take shelter—it is your place to live life in whatever way seems most appropriate to you. To create memories, to inhabit in both physical and intangible ways.’
But it’s hard to imagine hosting a dinner party around a table that folds out of the wall, or finding space to keep a pet or store personal mementos and trinkets in a home roughly the size of a standard bus. The people of Billennium spill out beyond their private spaces and into the public plane, and are often found ‘sitting on the steps [… ] using the staircase as an informal lounge.’ Similarly, the assumption behind small homes is that occupants lounge, unwind, and entertain themselves in public spaces then return home, sated, to bathe, eat, and sleep. By design, micro-apartments and other tiny homes force inhabitants, to a large extent, to ‘create memories’ and ‘live life’, beyond the four walls of home.
Yet these assumptions can only be realised within a truly open, equitable city that does not exist. In reality, vast swathes of ‘public space’ are increasingly inaccessible, many usable only by those with the requisite amount of financial capital. Beyond parks and libraries, how many places in the modern city allow one to linger—particularly in the evening—without making (or feeling obliged to make) some sort of purchase? When urban planners describe ‘active street frontages’, for example, they mean sidewalks lined with cafes and restaurants; when lobbyists talk about Keeping Sydney Open they mean ‘open’ to those with disposable income to spend on meals, alcohol, and live music.
Beyond parks and libraries, how many places in the modern city allow one to linger without making some sort of purchase?
Similarly, many public spaces demand a certain degree of social capital as the cost of admission. Hostile architectural elements like homelessness spikes and anti-sleep benches are mainstays of parks and public squares, gendered and racialised street harassment is widespread, and police surveilling of people of colour—particularly of First Nations people—for merely existing within public spaces is sadly common.
Of course the inverse proposal, that people must ‘live life’ only within the constraints of their own home, is itself far from ideal. Pandemic-related lockdowns over the past 15 months have shown the heavy toll confinement exacts on mental health, and rates of domestic violence have spiked. Almost a quarter of respondents to a University of Melbourne study into share houses during the pandemic reported suffering from ‘overcrowding stress’ and finding it difficult to meet their work and leisure needs at home. Lockdown has shown that private spaces not only need to be safe and comfortable: they must also be supplemented by free access to public space.
Striking this balance requires thinking outside the box—not making the box smaller. Dwellings must be designed with ample room for inhabitants to live and relax, and public spaces need to allow joy and life to spill beyond the four walls of home. Both are easier said than done, and neither can be achieved through design innovation and deft marketing alone. They’ll require policy change, a rethinking of what ‘home’ means in a modern context, and a radical shift away from our ever-creeping cultural obsession with efficiency.
Maybe these changes are within our reach. Maybe we can achieve them if we tear down the systems that relentlessly push us toward ruthless optimisation and make cramped, compromised positions feel like our only option.
Or maybe they’re a dream for another billennium.
