How Do You Cram 8 Rooms and Sleeping Space for Three in 420 Stylish Square Feet? Crowdsource the Design

Living cheap in an urban area often means living in dirty, ugly apartments. Seeking to transform living small into a pleasurable experience, stylish micro apartments could be the future of urban life.

TreeHugger.com founder Graham Hill showed off his 420 square foot micro apartment to Yahoo recently. The tiny studio boasts a plethora of moving walls and fixtures, allowing Hill to maximize the space, as well as offering configurations for sleeping up to three people, hosting dinner parties, and dividing the space into up to eight rooms.

"We also think we can get the functionality of a larger apartment in less space That's really good for the environment. It's also really good for their pocketbook,"

said Hill in a Gizmodo video.

By eliminating redundancies such as a television - replacing it with a projector and streaming video from a computer - and separate microwave and conventional ovens - combining the two into one appliance - the crowdsource designed LifeEdited apartment has a clean and uncluttered interior space.

"We got 300 entries from around the world - some really amazing stuff. We ended up selecting these two Romanian architecture students, Adrian [Iancu] and Catalin [Sandu],"

said Hill, referring to the unconventional way the apartment was designed.

The trend is inspiring many micro apartment buildings to go up in cities in the United States, such as the My Micro NY building in Manhattan's Gramcery Park neighborhood by nARCHITECTS. The building offers cheap living, by Manhattan standards anyway, with studios starting at $940 a month.