Material Politics of Micro Urban Housing

This thesis investigates various socio-material trends that influence housing culture within increasingly intensified urban conditions. These trends indicate emerging societal values relating to affordability, the sharing economy and the reterritorialization of both domestic and urban environments. Design research contemplates how these values align with emerging theories related to material politics and how the design of our built environment can inform society’s perception of a greater affective density. These theories describe the interrelationships between architecture, our shared consumption of energy and resources, material agency, and designed flexibility of urban and domestic space. These interrelationships define a set of objective comparators that are used in the evaluation of various housing types that are familiar to western cultures. An analysis of this evaluation describes a morphology of domestic architecture that guides the design process of creating a micro housing model located in Toronto’s urban core.