“When Parallel Lines Meet”: Realizing Socially Resilient Public Housing through Reconciling Formal and Informal Practices in the UAE
Publication: Journal of Architectural Engineering
Volume 27, Issue 3
Abstract
Socially resilient housing design aims to satisfy the diverse and ongoing changing social needs of the residents. In reaction to the problem of the lack of responsiveness to changing residents' needs, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) public housing has experienced two contending responses: informal and formal. The investigations into the residents' informally constructed extensions revealed some resulting patterns of architectural design morphologies for size, shape, form, and style, utilized construction methods, techniques, and materials. These actions, although they responded to the residents' social needs, were coupled with some functional, constructional, and negative health impacts due to the residents' lack of technical experience. In addition, the formal responses largely failed to solve the inadaptability problem. Reconciling the competing formal and informal practices by building on the advantages and limiting the disadvantages of each has yielded a promising conceptual design approach for socially resilient public housing in the UAE.
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Published In
Journal of Architectural Engineering
Volume 27 • Issue 3 • September 2021
Copyright
© 2021 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Aug 11, 2020
Accepted: Apr 19, 2021
Published online: Jun 15, 2021
Published in print: Sep 1, 2021
Discussion open until: Nov 15, 2021
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