Rowan McCormick

PhD Student in Cultural Anthropology

Supervisors: Eli Elinoff, Jeff Sissons and Philip Fountain

Auto-construction in Aotearoa - building alternatives in a time of crisis

I have spent much of my working life building and renovating conventional houses in New Zealand and London. More recently I have been working with people building their own housing, using recycled materials, earth, straw, trash, greenwood, split and pit-sawn longs and other ‘good’ stuff not stocked on merchants’ racks. I have been struck by the contrast between conventional building materials and processes, and the rhythms, practices and considerations of folk making home in home-made dwellings.

Like my builders’ methods and material assemblages, the present building/research project emerges at a time of persistent and worsening environmental and housing crises. It also emerges within a context of (ongoing) colonial settlement in the South Pacific. As such, this project presents opportunities to think about the relationship between political ideals, and national narratives around identity, development and habituation, and the lived realities of different communities making do from day to day.

I explore the experiences, considerations and motivations of self-builders constructing values-based housing. Using an ethnographic approach engaging building as method, I work alongside builders, talking, thinking and labouring through materials, methods, place and space. In this way we share understandings of the relationship between building and housing, and wider environmental, political and economic concerns. In that they present alternatives to conventional building and housing practices and narratives, I ask how their building and dwelling practices might intervene in the experience of housing and economic inequality in Aotearoa New Zealand. Together, we consider other ways of thinking about and making home in the crisis contemporary of a settler colonial south Pacific nation.

Contact: rowan.mccormick@vuw.ac.nz