Reconstructing the American Dream

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.

Author Biography

Ella Harris is an independent creative researcher who specializes in ‘crisis cultures’ and creative methods. Her previous publications include Rebranding Precarity (2020) and Encountering the World with i-Docs (2025).

Mel Nowicki is a Reader in Urban Geography at Oxford Brookes University, UK. Her research focuses on people’s lived experience of housing crisis in a range of contexts. Her first book, Bringing Home the Housing Crisis: Politics, Precarity and Domicide in Austerity London was published in 2023.

Tim White is a researcher and writer interested in housing, cities and inequality. He is currently an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at the Free University of Berlin, and a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Cian Oba-Smith is an Irish Nigerian photographer born and raised in London. His work focuses on communities and subcultures around the world with a particular interest in approaching subjects that are often misrepresented with a view to presenting them in an alternate light. The relationship between human experience and environment is at the core of his projects.