ABSTRACT
This perspective on alternative housing focuses on do-it-yourself self-sufficiency, living frugally and being content to live without unnecessary expenditure or with ‘standards’ yet, arguably, enjoy a higher quality of life than the average person now experiences. The chapter asserts that perfectly adequate, extremely cheap and even beautiful dwellings could easily be available to everyone, and elaborates on the Simpler Way visitor centre established at Pigface Point, close to Sydney (Australia) set within hundreds of hectares of environmentally protected bushland. The centre demonstrates many alternative technologies and talks offered introduce visitors to a concept of settlements full of little firms and farms, commons crammed with forests, edible landscapes and ponds, i.e. future settlements made by leisure-rich community working bees. The chapter explains aspects of housing at Pigface Point and discusses how alternative housing might fit into a wider vision of the kind of restructured settlements that would enable a sustainable society.
