ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how we can (and in many places already do) build more inclusive eco-housing. This requires understanding the interweaving pressures that push up the price of housing per se, from capitalist processes, state/government processes, to social processes. It also requires identifying those costs that are excluded from current calculations, such as the unaccounted environmental impacts of housing, and lifetime and maintenance costs. Inclusive and affordable eco-housing is about basic rights to secure, safe, healthy and cheap-to-run shelter. Yet the current ways in which housing is ‘costed’ are both limited and limiting, and the processes of why and how we build houses create unaffordable housing. Affordable eco-housing is an outcome of social justice.
There are many examples of affordable eco-housing which are diverse, inclusive and potentially replicable. However, many of the existing examples of affordable eco-housing rely upon self-labour, government initiatives, large loans or free land. This chapter offers a supportive but critical analysis of the extent to which existing innovative approaches have overcome long-standing forms of exclusion and injustice. Building on many years of fieldwork, spanning over 30 case studies, this chapter draws on two examples in particular to examine the extent to which it is possible to build eco-homes for all.
