Affordable Housing and Circular Economy for Middle Income Group (M40) in Malaysia

Abstract

A housing development in Malaysia is pressured to include a green agenda in its development planning. The issue of green agenda is prioritized in the recent Malaysia Plan (2016–2020) under strategies for sustainable development. However, the challenges to provide steady development for a modern community and the desire to promote a healthy environment have become the main setbacks especially in developing countries like Malaysia. Therefore, the flexZhouse business model (BM) combines innovative leasing with elements of the circular economy as part of the strategy to provide green affordable housing to the customer in its lifecycle chain. This chapter reports part of the thesis entitled: flexZhouse: a new business model for affordable housing in Malaysia. It contributes to the scientific community by combining the idea of greening affordable housing with innovative leasing inspired by circular economy principles. This article is considered as the first study to integrate flexible housing with the circular economy. Therefore, it fills a gap in the knowledge about prefabricated housing and industrialized building (IB) industry. This chapter, which solves the identified problems by developing a new business model (BM), will benefit the government of Malaysia, as it formulates a solution for green affordable housing schemes and creates an alternative business model (BM) for the housing industry.