Dwellers' evaluation of housing schemes based on the quality of the built environment

Abstract

Through out history, we can observe that livability and mass housing have always been at odds with each other. One important reason for this is that many of the past urban housing endeavors did not encourage designing buildings with emphasis on community space and comfortable individual spaces. Hence most of them were lacking in qualitative aspects. Qualitative evaluations of built environments thus seem to be an essential component in creating more meaningful and livable places to enrich and enhance the lifestyles of dwellers. In this regard the judgments of dwellers of their built environments can be venerated as a significant feature in designing better housing schemes and finding alternative strategies. Therefore an attempt has been made in this research to evaluate housing schemes (the government built multi-storeyed housing schemes for low-income people in the urban context) and their quality of the built environment through the judgments of its dwellers. It is hoped that this can be used or developed as a technique in assessing or in designing high-rise housing schemes that will be built in the future. The content of the study has been categorized into four chapters. In the first chapter (Chapter One) the issue and the background to the issue are discussed. The magnitude of the housing problem in the city, the strategies implemented to solve this by the previous governments are briefly described. Most of the time these solutions have been mere provision of quantitative requirements. Therefore the importance of considering the dwellers' intimate perceptions and the need of an evaluation through their judgment on a theoretical basis are also discussed as a general introduction to the next chapter. Hence, Chapter Two is a descriptive explanation of the theoretical approach and the methodology adopted. In Chapter Three the details of the selected setting for the study and the reasons for its selection are discussed. A detailed description of the fieldwork (how the pilot test was carried out, how the components were derived from the findings of the pilot test and from the pre-conceived theoretical framework, how data was collected for the final research) is also included in the latter part of the same chapter. Finally in the fourth chapter (Chapter Four) the process of analysis is discussed in the form of profiles by dividing them into certain categories. Then the observations are described to reveal the findings upon which the conclusions have been drawn.