Urban compact living: Making home in the city: An ethnographic case study of compact living in an urban Danish context

Compact living is increasingly promoted as a tool for relieving the strain on high-pressure urban housing markets. This applies to Danish cities too. However, compressing the size of dwellings entails a substantial risk of impairing housing conditions severely. Given the novelty of the phenomenon, there is a gap in knowledge about the motivations behind choosing urban compact living and about how life is actually lived, practiced and experienced in this context. The dissertation contributes to filling this gap by analysing such questions through an ethnographic case study set in a contemporary urban Danish context. The dissertation argues that urban compact living cannot be reduced to a question of square metres, but must be understood as cultural and socio-structural processes of making home.