At the beginning with the desire for practical spatial experience, outside of authority relations, this thesis tells a story towards autonomy. Starting from the Covid-19 quarantine period with sewing, repairing and constructing, followed by the social fermentation and the acquaintance with empirically constructed small houses, then looking for a plot and building materials. It then led to the deconstruction of the whole idea, to be launched as a research paper. While researching the elements of the DIY phenomenon and the autoconstruction movement, an attempt is made to develop a record, study and categorisation of small houses and the subjects who built them.

At the first level, I'm presenting the theoretical concepts that concerned me, like autonomy, disobedience, degrowth, simplicity, autoconstruction, back-to-the-landers, rural life, reuse, craftsmanship, participatory architecture. Afterwards, there is a list of small-house typologies: permanent, semi- permanent, summer holiday, urban, provincial, suburban, located in the public sphere, on common land, private land, using off-grid technology, mobile, immovable, parked, under participatory design and construction. Finally, I selected a plot/ parcel located in Dasochori a -mainly male dominated- popular rural area in the Province of Thessaly, Greece for the case study. It is a record of my journey towards the invention of my micro-economy, ecology, return to nature and know-how.

This subject/ motive of this research is the deepening and better understanding of issues such as rural depopulation, reuse, collaboration and participation in architectural design and construction of buildings and model objects with specialised craftsmanship and workshops, identification of the advantages and disadvantages of spatial micro-housing and auto-construction in a greek agricultural suburb.