Strategies of Adaptability:
Designing affordable housing needs efficient strategies to reduce costs without affecting housing adequacy. Accordingly, this paper tries to clarify the potential of adaptability strategies for affordable housing design. These strategies provide the ability of housing for merge, division, growth, and changing uses but in a minimum physical way.
It is acknowledged that designing adaptability is an important approach for designing a sustainable housing environment because adaptability strategies are considered social, environmental, and economic concepts. Such strategies enhance the ability of housing to adapt different needs of users through time. Therefore this paper analyzes strategies for designing adaptable housing and their suitability for affordable housing design. To do so, three values of designing affordability are chosen: decreasing the area of housing, decreasing the amount of building materials, and simplicity of implementing methods.
Thus, the paper highlights the potential of adaptability strategies for achieving the previous values. We will use the SWOT analysis method to highlight strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of the adaptability strategies in terms of affordability values. The paper concludes that adaptability is a high-potential approach for affordable housing design because it could provide many positive results. Therefore, the proposed control of strategies and recommendations of this paper may assist designers in enhancing opportunities and reducing weaknesses and threats of adaptability strategies to maintain the values of affordable housing design in their projects.
Affordable housing should not be described as low-cost housing, because low-cost housing may lead to poor quality of buildings such as inadequate space area or poor building materials. Low-cost housing will also increase indirectly the monthly payment of living for the householders. For example: low efficiency of building materials will increase the bills of electricity, gas, and maintenance, not to mention the bad effects of poor designs and materials on the resident’s heath, and the surrounding environment.
This fact makes reducing the costs of housing a serious problem. Such problems lead to the importance of finding creative solutions to design that decrease the costs of housing without affecting its quality. For that reason, one of the most important global problems facing architects today is how to design adequate but affordable housing. This means that designing housing should be at reasonable prices that correspond with the income of users while not compromising the quality of housing: environmental and social. It is acknowledged that good architectural design and proper planning of housing are very important factors to reduce the cost, towards affordability inside of low-costing.
Accordingly, there is a need to examine some creative strategies for designing affordable housing. Hence, the role of the architect in designing for affordability is to keep looking for strategies that make a balance between the cost of housing and other environmental and social qualities.
In other words, it is vital to introduce successful strategies for designing adequate housing that decreases the consumption of land, energy, and construction materials. In addition, strategies for affordable housing design should be based on Low-tech solutions. Therefore this paper aims to discuss such Low-Tec strategies of housing design: Adaptability in particular.
The design for adaptability is an important approach to designing affordable and sustainable housing because it is based on finding strategies that facilitate adapting the building through time with minimum changes by using simple tools, which reduce the running costs of the building. Besides, the idea of adaptable housing is in general a low-tech idea, as adaptable houses should have a simple plan form and straightforward construction methods to conserve economic values.
In addition, there is a correlation between the ability of housing to change and the need for sustainable design, since it is a good way to reduce the consumption of construction materials, energy, and land both in the short and long term. The design for adaptability aims also at providing maximum satisfaction for users through time because adaptability responds to the human need for change while expecting limited changes in the built environment, which encourages positive behavior. As a result, designing for adaptability could be a strategic approach for affordable and sustainable housing in terms of economic, environmental, and social benefits.