The growing interest for tiny house’s in Québec
Urban sprawl has long been a puzzle for sustainable urban transition in North America. For decades, urbanism has been waging war against it. Simultaneously, representations of the single family detached home has been evolving and adapting to the emergence of discourses about sustainable cities. In Quebec, Canada, the tiny house phenomenon place in these debates is ambiguous. Tiny houses have been presented as a sustainable and affordable housing utopia, as an inexploited market niche and as a key element in a « soft » densification strategy that could help suburbs transition to a more sustainable urban form. This action research case study proposes to study this ambiguity by analyzing the process of coconstruction of the « tiny house » object in Quebec by using press analysis, documentary analysis and participant observations. This article concludes that this process facilitated the creation of new links between a wide variety of actors and seems to be an opportunity to question the single family detached home model in regard to affordability, voluntary simplicity, soft densification and the sustainable transition of suburbs.