Housing for degrowth narratives

Degrowth challenges the hegemony of growth and calls for a democratically led proportional and redistributive downscaling of production and consumption as a means to achieve environmental sustainability, social justice and well-being. Degrowth implies alternative institutions and ethics, and an efficiency, which is frugal or based on reducing inputs and outputs. Housing for degrowth proposes reducing the total urban area; simplifying and redistributing access to housing; halting industrial urbanisation; deurbanising and renaturalising areas; renovating dwellings to improve living conditions; sharing dwellings more; and developing low level, low impact, small scale, decentralised, compact settlements. Certain processes of a degrowth transformation of housing are already taking place. A variety of approaches coalesce in the degrowth narrative, a narrative contra most current housing lobbies from the Right and even from the pro-growth Left. In this story, degrowth actors are part of a coherent coalition.