The Tiny House Movement

Book excerpt: The Tiny House Movement: Challenging Consumer Culture features in-depth interviews with movement residents, builders, and advocates, as well as the author’s insights from her fieldwork of living tiny. In it, we learn how the movement is challenging consumerism, overwork, and environmental destruction and facilitating a more meaningful understanding of home. This book highlights that the tiny house movement is more than a lifestyle choice and that the movement challenges the consumerist lifestyle. In Canada and the United States, we are taught that bigger is better and that constant growth in our personal wealth, accumulation, and in the economy is a sign of our success. We sacrifice well-being and life satisfaction because of our relationship with ‘stuff.’ This leads to personal debt and unsustainability in our relationships, communities, and the environment. This is the first book to examine the tiny house movement as a challenge to consumer culture by demonstrating its potential to offer individual, collective, and societal change.