A Strategy for Spatializing Degrowth at Home: Commoning of Housing

Many theorists advocate for "economic degrowth," which entails "scaling down production and consumption activities," as a radical proposal to achieve environmental sustainability and social justice. This is in response to the increasingly destructive nature of economic growth on a planet with limited resources, as well as the unequal distribution of the costs associated with changes to planetary boundaries. The examination of spatial production and consumption processes holds significant potential for realizing the social transformation required for economic activities to operate within planetary boundaries. However, the scarcity of studies on how the ideas of degrowth can be translated into the material world highlights the need to focus on how degrowth will manifest spatially. The problem of spatializing degrowth will be addressed in this study, with a focus on housing. The injustices inherent to growth-oriented housing production processes make it imperative to discuss the spatialization of degrowth through housing. For degrowth to manifest spatially at home, the spatial modes of production inherent to economic growth, the spatial consumption patterns, and the social relations produced by space need to become compatible with the fundamental goals of degrowth. To provide a compass for aligning housing production and consumption processes with the fundamental objectives of degrowth, it is imperative to identify the toolkit employed by economic growth for spatialization and to analyze criticisms directed against existing housing degrowth experiments. Through the analysis of these two principal themes, commoning of housing emerges as a viable strategy for spatialization of degrowth at home.