Reconstructing the American Dream - by Ella Harris & Mel Nowicki & Tim White (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Small homes, big questions: what tiny living says about the future of housing.

Tiny houses have become a viral sensation, representing everything from off-grid freedom to a desperate solution for housing insecurity. But what is life really like inside them? In Reconstructing the American Dream, Ella Harris, Mel Nowicki, Tim White, and Cian Oba-Smith take readers beyond the Instagram aesthetic to explore the realities of tiny living in Texas.

Through striking photography and deeply personal accounts, the book examines who chooses to "go tiny" and who is pushed into it, how these homes function as both countercultural retreats and reflections of a shrinking American Dream, and why the movement embodies contradictions at every turn. Drawing on urban studies, sociology, and geography, the authors reveal the economic and political forces that have made tiny housing both an alternative to and a symptom of the broader housing crisis.

Reconstructing the American Dream is both a collection of compelling stories and beautiful images and a critical analysis of the meaning of home and community in an era of increasing precarity. An insightful reference for housing researchers, urbanists, and anyone questioning what "home" truly means today.

Review Quotes

"Are tiny homes an outcome of expanded housing possibilities or a consequence of constrained options? Reconstructing the American Dream documents life inside tiny home communities in Texas to explore the different pathways, aspirations, challenges, and freedoms associated with tiny home living. Through vivid text and photographs, the book complicates the popular image of tiny homes and examines the possibilities and limits of new community forms."
-- "Dr Esther Sullivan (University of Colorado), author of Manufactured Insecurity: Mobile Home Parks and Americans' Tenuous Right to Place"

"This book invites you into the intriguing and growing phenomena of tiny housing in Texas. The homes have alluring aesthetics, but it is the characters - shared so wonderfully through Oba-Smith's photography and the enlivening text--that radiates beautifully through the stories of journeys, places, lives, contradictions, and triumphs over adversity, and makes this book feel so rich and lively. Much more than a celebration of tiny living, it is, as the authors'; note a 'disrupted coffee table book', as keen to share with the reader the complexities and challenges of tiny housing as its hopeful possibilities--brilliantly using a board game to capture these varied journeys. Rarely has robust academic work been shared so creatively and beautifully. I invite you all in to explore the tiny house nation."
-- "Professor Jenny Pickerill (University of Sheffield), author of Eco-Homes: People, Place and Politics"

About the Author

Ella Harris is an independent creative researcher Her previous publications include Rebranding Precarity and Encountering the World with i-Docs. Mel Nowicki is a reader in Urban Geography at Oxford Brookes University, UK. She is the author of Bringing Home the Housing Crisis: Politics, Precarity and Domicide in Austerity London. Tim White is a researcher and writer studying housing, cities, and inequality. He is the Humboldt Research Fellow at the Free University of Berlin and a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics. Cian Oba-Smith is an Irish Nigerian photographer born and raised in London.