High-rise Housing Development Research Articles

Neglected Aspects and Maladaptation to Rules in Low-Cost Housing, Malaysia: Social Practices of Commoning

The enactment, monitoring, and enforcement of rules play a crucial role in determining the success of self-organisation in common properties within high-rise housing developments. However, maladaptation to these rules can arise from diverse factors such as the parcel holders’ backgrounds, history, norms, and culture, leading to disrepair or the emergence of urban slums. This study examines two key issues: the influence of rules on the self-organisation of common properties, particularly in high-rise apartments, and the occurrence of maladaptation due to the forced relocation of urban squatters to new environments. Employing a mixed-method approach involving a questionnaire survey, interviews, and field observations, the findings underscore the significant impact of rules on self-organisation in high-rise housing. Furthermore, the forced relocation of urban squatters to unfamiliar environments comes at a heavy cost. The paper advocates heightened attention to soft human infrastructure, placemaking, and the introduction of commoning as a social practice to enhance adaptation to new living environments.

The Perception of Thermal Comfort in Malaysia Public Low-Cost Housing

In Malaysia, the thermal comfort of low-cost high-rise housing has not been widely given a significant emphasis in the qualitative study despite its increasing scale and significance in the urban areas. Occupant’s perception and adaptive behaviour are important to achieve the level of satisfaction in terms of a comfortable living environment. This paper assesses the occupants’ perception and behaviour in a low-cost high-rise housing development that has been argued with various problems which have a considerable impact on lifestyle. Understanding of comfort as social and cultural behaviour, rather than an engineering approach. This research shows the results of a pilot study that utilized a qualitative strategy for analysing thermal comfort, rather than using the standard thermal comfort research methodologies. The building of study, in the category of low-cost high rise residential located at the urban context of Kuala Lumpur housing area, which is mainly natural ventilated with a versatile adaptive possibility available for the occupants. The outcomes signify the adaptive behaviour that enhances or limit the thermal comfort-related varieties. The results from the pilot study direct for more extensive research and comparison with previous qualitative studies.
 Keywords: Thermal comfort, Qualitative study, Occupant perception, Adaptive behaviour, Housing

Assessing Housing Design Sustainability Using Urban Fabric Indicators: A Case Study of Middle Range High Rise Housing Development at Bandar Perda

Assessing Housing Design Sustainability Using Urban Fabric Indicators: A Case Study of Middle Range High Rise Housing Development at Bandar Perda

Assessing Housing Design Sustainability Using Urban Fabric Indicators: A Case Study of Middle Range High Rise Housing Development at Bandar Perda

Assessing Housing Design Sustainability Using Urban Fabric Indicators: A Case Study of Middle Range High Rise Housing Development at Bandar Perda

Melbourne’s vertical expansion and the political economies of high-rise residential development

This article advances understandings of Melbourne’s dramatic vertical expansion over the last decade by attending to the political economies of its high-rise housing development. Melbourne’s major high-rise development in the wake of the financial crisis represents a radical yet poorly understood departure from the city’s traditional patterns of suburban development. This article applies an existing conceptual framework for residential vertical urbanisation informed by heterodox political economy and critical geography. Drawing on secondary sources supplemented by supply-side stakeholder perspectives, the analysis shows how Melbourne’s high-rise development assisted in syphoning significant investor capital into the city. This not only expanded the local housing stock but, in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis and later, amid ongoing economic uncertainty, Melbourne’s high-rise construction served both economic and geopolitical/symbolic functions in the city’s ongoing inter-urban competition for hyper mobile flows of capital and highly-skilled workers. Large apartment projects fuelled the Victorian economy and filled state coffers through property-related revenue. Meanwhile, the city’s dramatic vertical expansion helped project a powerful image of Melbourne around the world. Its crane-filled skyline heralded a thriving economy, and its new thicket of towers rendered a striking impression of urbane high-density living. Together these representations helped promote Melbourne as a vibrant, desirable place to live, work, and invest. Looking beyond the planning failures and planning politics identified in planners’ critiques of Melbourne’s vertical expansion, this article showcases the state’s considerable stakes in this development, and its role in smoothing the way for this expansion to occur.

The Nation’s ‘Other’ Housing Project

Singapore’s privatised high-rise housing landscape is the nation’s ‘other’ housing project, emerging alongside the city-state’s dominant narrative of its successful public housing project since the 1970s. Unique to Singapore’s privatised high-rise housing developments was the intervention of the state in the close regulation of scarce land. Singapore’s private high-rise housing developments thus reflect a nation’s attitude towards its land as resource, and its subsequent imaginations and productions of more ‘land’ in the construction of high-rise housing estates. State intervention also maximised these housing developments as part of wider national aspirations to the status of a global city, and for its citizens, a ‘green and gracious’ Singaporean society. Taking the Pearlbank Apartments and the Pandan Valley Condominium as two key developments of Singapore’s emerging private high-rise housing landscape in the 1970s, this article examines the production of the nation’s aspirational housing in the confluence of Singaporean state-led vision and a people’s housing aspirations.

Theorising vertical urbanisation

Taller, denser and more diverse city skylines are a hallmark of 21st century urban change. Although vertical urbanisation is increasingly ubiquitous, this development has not followed a single universal pattern. It is not uniform in its scale, its target neighourhood types, nor in its design, which spans ‘starchitect’-designed skyscrapers and generic tower blocks. Urban scholars have traditionally considered vertical development via less specific concepts such as intensification, and only recently has the expression ‘vertical urbanisation’ risen in prominence. There remains however a lack of integration and theorisation of vertical expansion across social science debate. This siloing of diverse perspectives encourages isolated accounts and hinders shared understandings around the processes it entails. Yet interest lies not only in examining the specifics of each new local crop of towers, but also in explaining the process of vertical expansion itself as performative and constitutive of shifting social relations. Equally, integrating distinct local, historical, and institutional trajectories within robust theoretical schema can enhance understandings of vertical expansion in particular times and places. This paper steps towards these ambitions by conceptualising residential vertical urbanisation as a special kind of spatial fix. Using intertextual theorisation and drawing upon Aalbers and Christophers’ recent theorisation of housing’s functions under capitalist political economy, this article positions residential high-rise development within the circuitry of capitalist accumulation. In particular, and independently of national or local specifics, it develops an exploratory conceptual schema for high-rise housing development based on its three interrelated functions as: labour and capital intensive commodities; as investments on real estate markets tied to financial markets; and as cultural artefacts of distinction both in inter city competition and geopolitics, and in class relations. The proposed theorisation does not explain vertical expansion in every case, indeed it emphasises the importance of interrogating the role of intermediaries, states, and local opportunity structures in understanding the local contours of vertical expansion. Nonetheless, by providing a theoretically informed heuristic that is sensitive to temporal and geographic contingencies, and into which specific occurrences of vertical expansion can be embedded, this framework offers to promote communication between these occurrences as related yet locally contingent phenomena of financialised capitalism.

The Moscow Suburbs: Specifics and Spatial Development of Rural Areas

The specifics of and spatial trends in the development of rural areas in post-Soviet Moscow oblast, especially after the linear expansion of Moscow’s territory, are considered. A combination of centripetal and centrifugal vectors of population mobility is shown, representing oppositely directed migrations: on the one hand, people are attracted to permanent residence and labor migrants stream into the capital and its suburbs from other regions of Russia and CIS countries; on the other, there is the drain of Muscovites to their dachas. The diversity of the suburban territory is shown with various degrees of remoteness from the capital. Highrise housing development beyond the city limits is characteristic of oblast municipalities closest to the Moscow Ring Road; therefore, the development around the capital continues in all directions like an oil spot. Nevertheless, housing construction activity in the southern and southwestern municipalities near Moscow, adjacent to New Moscow, has been higher in recent years, resulting in numerous insular bedroom suburbs whose residents work in Moscow. With a high density of the rural population and dacha dwellers, the emergence of areas of high-rise housing development creates many problems. The active expansion of housing development has led to a sharp reduction in agricultural land. Meanwhile, Moscow oblast, witnessing a severe decay of agriculture in many regions of the Non-Chernozem Zone, remains a powerful food producer, supplying not only the capital and its suburbs but also other Russian regions. All this makes Moscow oblast Russia’s most successful region, as well as one of the most problematic.

The Implication of Slum Relocations into Low-cost High-Rises: An Analysis through the infrastructure of everyday life

This paper presents the implications of slum relocation into low-cost high-rise housing development. Desa Mentari was selected as a case study for this research where its characteristics as a low-cost high-rise residential for relocated former squatter dwellers best fit the requirement. The data were then analysed against the five domains of the Infrastructure of Everyday Life which are home and neighbourhood, sources of support, making ends meet, enjoyment and having a say. From the analysis, the author established that the major implications are the breakdown of the community structure, the rise of social ills, the deficient living environment and racial conflicts. The work conclusively argues that housing and planning policies should put much consideration into the everyday life activities, issues and needs of particular communities within society.

Un-forgetting walls by lines on maps: A case study on property rights, cadastral mapping, and the landscape of the Kowloon Walled City

This paper demonstrates that the framing of post-war Kowloon Walled City through photos has been dominated by the maps commonly used to represent this Chinese enclave in colonial Hong Kong as a place. Inspired by and extending Wylie’s (2009) argument that emptiness and presence are equally important, this paper uses basic GIS techniques and hitherto unpublished archival materials to help (a) argues that the colonial government’s mindset of clearly defining the spatial boundary of the city, which is a subtle admission of an officially and diplomatically denied otherness in ownership, created the city as a quasi-cadastral unit; and (b) explains how this shaped the framing of the landscape of the city by promoting investment and trade in high-rise housing development units. The government did not destroy its walls. When these were physically destroyed, it did not ignore the walls’ original alignments but treated the city as a planning unit, as if they still existed.

Virtual Prototyping for Construction Site Co2 Emissions and Hazard Detection

The need for an efficient means of managing emissions and identifying potential hazard black spots in construction processes effectively and at the lowest cost possible has been highlighted in the construction sector. This study illustrates an integrated 5D model developed for quantifying carbon emissions and simulating the pattern of emissions of construction processes as a whole using virtual prototyping technologies. The predicted construction emissions data for each activity is generated and plotted to visually demonstrate the emission rates alongside the integrated four-dimensional VP framework of the construction project. The model also consists of a pro-active construction management system (PCMS), which assist the project team to detect sources of danger to on-site workers and provide pro-active warnings to them so as to avoid fatal accidents that are often caused by falling from heights and being struck by moving objects. A Hong Kong high-rise housing development project is used to exhibit the application of the carbon emission visualisation and potential accident detection system. This tool aims to encourage construction industry practitioners to become more environmentally conscious and pro-active in carbon mitigation and safety performance.

Vertical cities as a solution for land scarcity: the tallest public housing development in Singapore

Singapore, whose land area is approximately 660 km2, is one of the most densely populated cities in the world. In the 2001 Concept Plan, the Urban Redevelopment Authority estimated that Singapore would need 800000 more homes or 6400 ha of land to cater to a projected population of 5.5 million. Considering other competing demands for land resources, the 2001 Concept Plan has suggested constructing taller buildings. Thus, in August 2001, the Housing and Development Board initiated the development of a new 50-storeys public housing design. The 50-storeys public housing development, which comprises about 2000 dwellings, is the first of its kind in Singapore. This paper provides an insight into the potential residents’ perception, attitudes, concerns and acceptability of such a high-rise high-density housing development that has features that are similar to a vertical city. Findings reveal that despite being accustomed to decades of high-rise living, less than half of the Singaporean population would choose to live in such dwellings. Younger and smaller households, as well as males tend to be more receptive towards this new housing form. The main attractions of such high-rise housing developments are the scenic view and windy environment in contrast to major concerns such as pricing, safety of the building structure, insufficient provision of facilities as well as traffic congestion. The findings have important implications for policy-makers, especially in congested cities where land is a major constraint, and the only way to build is upwards.

A Study on regulartions regarding high-rise housing developments

A Study on regulartions regarding high-rise housing developments

Social support and physical and mental health among dwellers in a high-rise housing development

Social support and physical and mental health among dwellers in a high-rise housing development

Apartment noise, auditory discrimination, and reading ability in children

This study examined the relationship between a child's auditory and verbal skills and the noisiness of his home. Expressway traffic was the principal source of noise. Initial decibel measurements in a high-rise housing development permitted use of floor level as an index of noise intensity in the apartments. Children living on the lower floors of 32-story buildings showed greater impairment of auditory discrimination and reading achievement than children living in higher-floor apartments. Auditory discrimination appeared to mediate an association between noise and aeading deficits, and length of residence in the building affected the magnitude of the correlation between noise and auditory discrimination. Additional analyses ruled out explanations of the auditory discrimination effects in terms of social class variables and physiological damage. Partialling out social class did, however, somewhat reduce the magnitude of the relationship between noise and reading deficits. Results were interpreted as documenting the existence of long-term behavioral aftereffects in spite of noise adaptation. Demonstration of postnoise consequences in a real-life setting supplement laboratory research showing the stressful impact of noise on behavior.

A student-community planned health project for the poor.

Abstract A student-community planned clinic was begun in an inner-city high-rise housing development; continuous evening operation has been maintained for two years. The problems encountered included apathy of public officials and medical professionals, wariness of people in the community, lack of money and complications in medical staffing. In spite of these difficulties, an apparently stable community-student-physician relation has developed. During the first year of operation 1426 patients were seen, almost exclusively for minor illness. However, 53 per cent of patients in whom secondary diagnoses were made (9.5 per cent of all patients) had serious medical problems underlying the minor illnesses that led them to seek medical care. Almost 17 per cent of all patients were referred to municipal hospitals or other medical centers in the city. The clinic therefore appeared to provide an effective portal of entry for patients into the existing health-care system of the city.