ABSTRACT
Small self-built homes that respond to their landscape settings and their occupants’ personal needs to achieve ‘low impact’ living embody practices and processes that converge with a degrowth approach to housing by looking beyond the confines of manufactured materials and industry standardisation. Low impact living matches reclaimed and natural resources to meet basic needs on a small scale and in response to landscape factors, individuals’ expertise and local opportunity; a low impact shelter is relatively independent of fossil-fuel based infrastructures and demonstrates potential for how housing might evolve in a degrowth world. This chapter outlines some key principles of low impact living in describing how housing for low impact living was established in two distinctly different contexts. The case studies show principles of degrowth through personal journeys in creating these dwellings, which included struggles with planning authorities. The report on the Lammas dwelling (the Undercroft) refers to the Welsh One Planet Development Policy and permaculture principles. Similarly, the low impact dwelling in Holzen (Germany) has incorporated degrowth processes of collaboration and conviviality.
