An Intentional Community Living Arrangement (ICLA) is a type of group housing in which member residents purposely combine their skills, resources and efforts to collectively build and maintain homes and community structures; care for each other; and, practice participatory and inclusive decision-making and governance. With the Australian population facing urban sprawl, a lack of affordability, and social transformations tied to changing household structures, it is timely to investigate possibilities that complement the current housing landscape. With the aim to establish the best practices in ICLA planning in the Australian context informed by global examples, this research elaborates a refined understanding of ICLAs. Objectively assessing the characteristics of ICLAs with particular focus on the Australian context and understanding the experiences of ICLA residents this thesis assesses ICLAs as a potential complement to the contemporary housing landscape in Australia that simultaneously addresses many of the most salient concerns facing the next generation of home dwellers. Preliminary findings show that communal living is a growing proportion of the Australian population yet current housing policy is missing out on the many cost efficiencies, increased social interaction of community members, and reductions in the ecological footprint of housing compared to single nuclear family housing styles.

Current public media discourse surrounding emerging tiny housing movements in Australia reflects a fundamental antipathy with the urban forms of advanced capitalism, but they also show a willingness to think and experiment with alternatives to the Great Australian Dream as a built form and sociocultural/sociopolitical space. Drawing on various social media, interviews and case studies this paper proposes that the tiny house movement in Australia be mapped as a ‘geography of resistance’. Here, resistance is not so much a question of grand or heroic gestures as of everyday battles in the struggle for survival or empowerment. The paper argues that it is a fertile, creative and rhizomic resistance that refuses as well as proposes producing diverse forms, creating new and unexpected networks and possibilities. Further, it makes suggestions on how such a mapping might contribute to a reawakening of imagination and possible futures. Key concepts in this discussion are drawn from Deleuzoguattarian theory, specifically assemblage and conditions of minority. Such thinking focuses on the accompanying affective flows and zones of indetermination hidden by structures of neoliberalism and discourses of consumerism traditionally associated with the Great Australian Dream.

Freedom camping practices support domestic or international travellers to occupy by deliberate choice a recreational vehicle (RV) as accommodation in an open space not bound by market-based commercial norms and camping and/or caravan park-based regulations. Despite a plethora of policy, practice and management environments that facilitate and regulate RVing, declining ‘commercial’ caravan and camping parks is contrasted by increasing consumer demands for additional ‘freedom’ camping venues. With fragmented and trans-disciplinary policy frameworks located across multi-layered public and private sector agencies the diverging phenomena are cause for political consternation among civic leaders in many regional communities. Additionally, the legal uncertainty and lack of uniformity both within and between different local and state government jurisdictions is causing anxiety, and sometimes penalty, for the caravanning public additional to presenting barriers for new entrants to the camping supply chain. This paper describes, critically analyses and explains a wicked public-policy process concerning freedom camping using pragmatic and reflexive knowledge making through multi-qualitative methods. It presents market failure of freedom camping supply in Australia as a significant finding and proposes an original taxonomy of caravanning to aid international understanding of the “other” in RVing as a major contribution to the fragmented RV and tourism policy-studies literature.