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Open House International
FORWARD PUBLISHING PLAN 2006-2008
The Previous Subscription Year, 2005.
Vol 30. 2005
No.1 March
OPEN BUILDING IN PERSPECTIVE.
Editor: Nicholas Wilkinson
E-mail: nicholaz.wilkinson@emu.edu.tr
This first issue of 2005 contains a selection of some
articles from the recent Open Building conference on Sustainable
Environment held in Paris at the CSTB headquarters in
September 2004. This issue signals the start of the regular
publication of material dealing with Open Building projects
either as additional articles in theme issues or as full
open building issues twice a year. After more than thirty
five years of experience Open Building is a recognizable
part of mainstream Architecture in housing and in health
care and renovation projects found in many different countries
of the world. Open Building projects in general show how
users are indispensable decision makers in the design
process and act as forces of change and adaptability over
time.
No.2 June
COMMUNITY ASSET MANAGEMENT – Africa, Asia and India
Guest Editors: Max Theis and Robert Brown, The Max Lock
Centre, University of Westminster,London.
E-mail: maxlockc@wmin.ac.uk
The world’s governments have agreed a campaign to
cut by half the proportion of people who live in absolute
poverty, and to provide access for everyone to basic social
services such as primary education and healthcare by the
year 2015. Hampering this however is generally poor design
and construction, a top-down delivery approach, a lack
of life cycle planning and appropriate management and
maintenance of these assets, in addition to the enormous
shortfall in basic infrastructure itself.
The question is how can these basic services be provided
and run so that they continue to contribute to the livelihood
of the people using them over the course of the asset’s
live, and that the longevity of that asset’s ability
to do so can be extended?
No.3 September
BEYOND RESIDENTIAL MOBILITY: Linking Residential Choice
with Urban Change
Guest Editors: Hugo Priemus & Roland Goetgeluk. OTB
Institute, University of Delft, The Netherlands.
E-mails: r.goetgeluk@otb.tu.delft.nl and priemus@otb.tudelft.nl
Over the past decades, residential mobility has received
a good deal of attention in the academic world. However,
its mutual relationship with urban change has a more recent
history. Even so, an increasing number of academic researchers
and policy makers who focus on housing processes and urban
transformations realize the importance of linking the
two together. This is exactly what this special issue
is about. Starting from the perspective of one of the
working groups of the European Network for Housing Research
– the migration, residential mobility, and housing
policy group (http://www.enhr.ibf.uu.se), we plan to relate
the knowledge on migration and residential mobility to
the knowledge of processes of urban change. A range of
papers on this topic was presented during the ENHR conference
in Cambridge in the summer of 2004.
No.4 December
PUTTING PEOPLE AT THE CENTRE - SUSTAINABLE HOUSING SOLUTIONS
WORLDWIDE
Guest Edited by the: Building and Social Housing Foundation,
Coalville, United Kingdom
E-mail: Diane.Diacon@bshf.org
For twenty years the World Habitat Award competition organised
by the Building and Social Housing Foundation has identified
innovative and long-lasting solutions to housing problems
faced by countries of the global South as well as the
North. Included in this issue are eighteen housing projects
which demonstrate successful approaches to some of the
most prevalent housing problems in the world today.
The projects are drawn from a range of different contexts.
They vary in size from large national programmes to individual
projects in small neighbourhoods and address a broad range
of housing-related issues. What they have in common is
an approach that recognises the value of involving people
in the decisions that affect their homes and lives. The
approaches used here transcend the divisions of North
and South and present concepts and approaches that have
proven capacity for transfer.
The Current Subscription
Year, 2006.
Vol. 31 2006
No.1 March
MANAGING URBAN DISASTERS
Guest Editor: Christine Wamsler, Housing Development &
Management (HDM)
Lund University, Sweden
E-mail Christine.wamsler@hdm.lth.se
Adviser: Kurt Rhyner, Grupo Sofonias, Glarus, Switzerland
E-mail: sofonias@compuserve.com
When naturally triggered hazards – such as flooding,
earthquakes, hurricanes or landslides – strike in
urban areas, the effects can be more disastrous than in
other environments. In many cities, disasters conspire
with rapid and unplanned urbanization, creating dangerous
situations of vulnerability, especially for around 1,2
billion poor that live worldwide on disaster-prone land
in badly built shelters. Documents like the UN Habitat
agenda call for a range of measures to reduce risk. Nevertheless,
there are few examples of such approaches and existing
disaster studies as well as most agencies, donors and
policy makers still focus mainly on rural areas. In this
context, the compendium of articles in the special OHI-issue
seeks to identify and demonstrate initiatives that mainstream
risk reduction within all sectors of urban development,
not only protecting lives but also reducing poverty. Based
on the thinking that emergency assistance, reconstruction,
mitigation and development aid do not have to be seen
as conflicting, independent principles, the articles can
cover all the mentioned working fields – but only
if active risk reduction is integrated within the concrete
initiatives. These can be realized by local or external,
non-governmental or governmental organizations, as well
as from private sectors. Articles discuss questions regarding
the factors that determine the vulnerability or resilience
of cities, and demonstrate concrete initiatives in the
field of housing and urban development that can reduce
the risk of low-income settlements for natural disasters.
Topics included here are appropriate housing design, construction
techniques, infrastructure improvements, urban management,
policies and codes, as well as related advocacy campaigns,
institutional strategies, methods and tools. The special
interest of “Handling Urban Disasters” lies
in demonstrating best practices from Africa, Asia and
Latin America with new integrated approaches to risk reduction,
that link different levels/actors and do not focus only
on technical questions.
No.2 June
OPEN BUILDING IN EDUCATION
Guest Editor: Prof. JIA Beisi, University of Hong Kong.
E-mail: jia@arch.arch.hku.hk
Housing courses, housing studio projects and housing-related
training programs have been key parts of architectural
curricula worldwide. In some schools ‘housing’
is the subject of core or basic courses. This is not simply
because housing remains the largest construction sector
in many countries; on a more fundamental level, housing
represents the intimate relationship between human activity
and built form. However housing design education often
falls short of social reality. Design studios regularly
produce static objects which do not reflect changing social
processes behind habitat formation. The problem lies in
a limited understanding of design. Open Housing advances
this understanding a step further by redefining housing
design as both process and object. It is about design
for uncertainty while integrating new technologies. In
order to accommodate this development, researchers, promoters,
educators and designers will need to adopt new teaching
methods. This issue of Open House provides a platform
where new teaching experiences and experiments about Open
Housing can be shared. The following topics are not exclusive:
Design for change,Housing education, Studio teaching methodology,
Open housing education in history, Studio work and Evaluation
No.3 September
DESIGN STUDIO TEACHING PRACTICES – Between Traditional,
Revolutionary & Virtual Models
Guest Editor: Ashraf Salama, King Fahd University of Petroleum
and Minerals-KFUPM.
E-mail: asalama@gmail.com
This issue of OHI explores studio teaching practices by
investigating pedagogical aspects
that associate different studio teaching models; traditional,
revolutionary, and virtual. The
conventional model represents studio teaching that follows
the educational system of the
Beaux-Arts and later the Bauhaus that primarily adopts
the mastery-mystery and showingtelling
modes of teaching. The revolutionary model represents
a number of alternative attempts that aimed at reshaping
the educational process in the studio by introducing new
concepts and theories including Piaget’s theory
of knowledge assimilation-accommodation,
Kolb’s theory of experiential learning, and other
teaching mechanisms. The virtual design
studio represents the recent advances in CAD and visualization,
combined with technologies
to communicate images, data, and simulated live actions.
Interestingly, none of the models
has replaced another; the three models coexist now in
most schools of architecture around
the world either as distinct unique models or integrated
to form new models.
Research papers in this issue will introduce cases that
shed light on paradigmatic shifts in
studio teaching practices in the developed and the developing
worlds. Papers may reflect on
a wide spectrum of studio types including architectural,
interior, landscape, urban, and
community design studios. While some papers will place
emphasis on creativity and social
responsibility as integral components in studio teaching,
others will explore dialectic
relationships between contents, methods, teaching/learning
styles; process-product
mechanisms; problem representations vs. exploring solutions;
competition vs. collaboration;
and the tools utilized by studio educators to achieve
their studio teaching objectives.
No.4 December
CULTURE, SPACE & TIME: Traditional Environments
Guest Editors: Hulya Turgut, Istanbul Technical University,
Turkey
E-mail space@itu.edu.tr
Peter Kellett, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
E-mail p.w.kellett@newcastle.ac.uk
Rapid change in living conditions and the contradictions
between global world culture and local cultures create
new paradigms and new dimensions about culture-space interactions.
This transition can be exemplified through examples of
traditional environments and brings out new developments
in both theory and practice. A vital issue for the field
is therefore the need of a new kind of database for planning
and designing in traditional environments. The new millennium,
with new strategies and paradigms, is an appropriate time
to review theories, concepts and methods of culture-space
studies. Within this context, theoretical and applied
research studies at various scales of traditional environments
should be examined and evaluated. With these aims, the
international symposium titled “Traditional Environments
In A New Millennium: Defining Principles And Professional
Practice” was jointly
The 2007 Subscription Year.
Vol. 32 2007
No.1 March
ARCHITECTURE IN THE DIGITAL AGE:The effect
of digital media on the design, production and evaluation
of the built environment
Guest Editors: Dr.Karim Hadjri, United Arab Emirates University,
El Ain, U.A.E.
E-mails : khadjri@emirates.net.ae
Dr. Jamal Al-Qawasmi , Department of Architecture
King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, SA
jamalq@kfupm.edu.sa
The influence of digital media and information technology
on architectural design education and practice is increasingly
evident. Architectural design, practice, fabrication and
construction are increasingly aided by and dependent on
digital technology. Digital technology has reconditioned
the design process and how we operate as architects, and
established new processes and techniques of fabrication.
New computerized studios such as the paperless studio
and the virtual design studio have been introduced in
many architectural schools as new ways of practicing and
teaching architectural design. Digital technology is fundamentally
changing the way we design, practice, and produce architecture.
In the last decade or so, there is a continuous demand
to deliver new skills in digital media and to rethink
architectural design education and practice in the light
of the new developments in digital technology. The proliferation
of computers and telecomputing in design education and
practice has resulted in a major paradigm shift and a
reorientation in theoretical and conceptual assumptions
considered to be central to traditional design education
and practice.
The pervasiveness in the use of digital technology in
architecture has given rise to a discourse and debate
on the relationship between digital technology and architecture.
Topics in the debate are continuously changing in light
of developments in the use of the digital technology.
Current debates are focusing on a wide range of related
issues among which digital pedagogy, digital practice,
digital design, digital environments, digital visualization,
digital evaluation, digital analysis, digital studio,
and digital production. Despite the extensive literature
on the subject, the impact of digital technology on how
we design, practice, teach, fabricate and produce architecture
has not been sufficiently examined.
This issue of OHI aims to provide a forum for debate arising
from findings as well as theory and methodologies. We
invite contributions from a wide and diverse community
of researchers. Papers in this issue will shed light on
how digital media affects the design, production and evaluation
of the built environment. Contributions may also explore
how digital technology is challenging fundamental assumptions,
theories and practices of traditional architectural design
education and practice. Papers may reflect on a wide spectrum
of issue which include -but are not limited to: virtualization
of design education, digital design methods and pedagogies,
future architecture with digital design, web-based design,
computer-mediated collaborative design, virtual reality
and design, virtual design studio, paperless studio, digital
studio/e-studio, design support environments, digital
thinking, digital practice digital production/fabrication,
digital visualization, and digital evaluation.
No.2 June
Open issue
No.3 September
METHODOLOGIES IN HOUSING RESEARCH
Guest Editors: Dick Urban Vestbro, KTH, Stockholm, Sweden.
E-mail: dickurba@infra.kth.se
Yonca Hurol, Eastern Mediterranean University, N.Cyprus
E-mail: yonca.al@emu.edu.tr
Nicholas Wilkinson, Eastern Mediterranean University,
N.Cyprus.
E-mail: nicholaz.wilkinson@emu.edu.tr
A selection of papers from the book Methodologies in Housing
Research from the conference of the same title held at
the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, in September
2003. The papers presented here is a result of a process
of selection from the book and conference contributions.
In the first place two coordinators of each workshop made
the first selection of papers for the book. Thereafter
the editors, in cooperation with others, reviewed the
papers. One criteria for selection was to secure a variety
of methods and to avoid overlaps. A collection of selected
articles as such, combines some advantages in comparison
to similar books in the same subject, especially if the
subject is as large as housing research. Rather than presenting
a research world in unity, it combines diverse approaches
to research and creates a more ambiguous but more open
ended and deep research understanding. The selected articles
cover the following subjects:
Methodologies in contemporary housing research, The perspective
of “inquiry.”Case study methodology, Participant
observation, Paired comparisons, The use of multi-dimensional
methodologies, Home environment for elderly, Cross-national
housing research, Consultation methodologies, Visual analysis,
Analysis of space, Income generation,Welfare state regimes,
Housing vacancy and urban shrinkage,Developments of computer
models, Use of computational simulations, Internet based
housing research, Measuring change in housing areas, Integrated
research methods and philosophical questioning, Generalisations
in housing research, and Less structured data.
No.4 December
Open issue
The 2008 Subscription Year.
Vol. 33 2008
No.1 March
ECO-LODGES AND ECO-TOURISM: Sustainable Planning and Design
for Environmentally Friendly Tourist Facilities.
Guest Editor: Ashraf Salama, King Fahd University of Petroleum
and Minerals-KFUPM.
E-mail: asalama@gmail.com
More and more tourists are increasingly abandoning traditional
vacation for a new type of tourism that gives them the
sense of nature. Trekking in mountains, bird watching,
archaeological digs, desert and photo safaris, scuba diving
are some new types of vacation that attract tourists to
travel to relatively remote and unspoiled areas. This
type of travel is referred to as nature-based travel,
ecotourism, or environmentally sustainable tourism. These
terms are used interchangeably in recent studies to reflect
the latest trend in travel industry, a newly emerged type
of tourism that combines preserving natural environments
and sustaining the well being of human cultures that inhabit
those environments. Such a type of tourism promotes environmental
responsibility and ensures that visitors take nothing
but photographs, and leave nothing but footprints. The
generic concept of environmentally sustainable tourism
has emerged in parallel to the realization of the potential
benefits in combining people interest in nature with their
concern for the environment. However, ecotourism has another
dimension since it can be a perfect economic activity
for local populations in a developing country that enjoys
uniqueness in natural resources. It is a responsible way
of travel; an alternative to traditional travel, but it
is not for everyone. It appeals to people who love nature
and local cultures. It allows those people to enjoy an
attraction or locality and ensures that local culture
and environment are unimpaired. However, the question
that remains really challenging is: How much change in
or alternations of natural and cultural environments will
be acceptable for the purpose of tourism?
As environmentally sustainable tourism industry expands
world-wide, well planned, ecologically sensitive facilities
are in high demand that can be met with ecolodges: small
scale facilities that provide tourists with the opportunity
of being in close contact with nature and local culture.
The ecolodge concept affirms that building footprints
and other necessary impositions on terra firma should
be designed in harmony with natural landscape and cultural
setting. With a design that respects the environment and
is in harmony with the landscape and cultural setting
of an area, an ecolodge is constructed using recycled
and locally produced building materials. It relies on
solar or alternative energies, recycles the waste and
the wastewater it generates, serves locally grown and
produced food. An ecolodge would be a facility that blends
in with its surroundings, offering visitors an environmental
experience of the natural and cultural world around them.
Research papers in this issue of Open House International
intend to explore qualities and characteristics of sustainable
planning and design of eco-lodges, with a focus on developments
taking place in biologically sensitive areas, whether
desert, forest, coastal/marine, riverine, or wetland environments.
Papers may reflect on sustainable tourism planning processes
and indicators, capacity building, training programs.
While some papers will place emphasis on ecological design
principles involved in eco-lodge development, highlighting
successful cases designed and built in sensitive destinations,
others may explore how environmentally friendly facilities
are conceived as integrated development tourism centers
within local, regional, or national plans.
No.2 June - Open issue
No.3 September
HIV / AIDS and SETTLEMENT DEVELOPMENT PLANNING
Guest Editor: Christine Wamsler, Housing Development &
Management (HDM)
Lund University, Sweden
E-mail : christine.wamsler@hdm.lth.se
During recent years, HIV/Aids has become part of the every-day
life in urban settlements in the developing world, being
one of today’s most serious and disastrous urban
challenges. Since HIV/Aids began in the early 1980s, the
pandemic has killed more than 20 million people worldwide.
Today, around 42 million people are living with the virus.
Out of these, over 95 per cent come from developing countries.
HIV/Aids and human settlement development are directly
inter-linked: At the municipal and national level, HIV/Aids
is weakening the ability of urban institutions to deliver
social housing, infrastructure and services due to loss
of staff, related lack of capacities, decrease in municipal
revenues (e.g. from taxes and service charges) and increasing
costs (e.g. for replacement, care and death benefits).
The construction sector also has suffered from the reduction
of labour force, with their employees partly being considered
as vectors for HIV/Aids. At the local level, inadequate
housing and settlements place poor populations at heightened
risk of HIV infection. Reasons relate to their exclusion
from basic health and education services, lack of formal
work, and insecure land tenure or property rights. Other
critical factors for the spread and impact of HIV/Aids
which relate to the built environment are high population
densities, crowdedness, frequency of interaction, and
lack of safe spaces, social cohesion and safety networks.
In addition, inadequate housing and settlements complicate
access to health care for persons already living with
HIV/Aids, resulting in improper and infrequent access
to therapy drugs, even when they are supplied at no cost.
Left behind are worldwide more than 13 million Aids orphans
as well as Aids widows that¾together with the other
mentioned problems¾confront urban institutions
with new demands and challenges. However, while cities
present incubators of HIV/Aids, at the same time they
also offer great opportunities for combating the disease.
Despite the described situation, in practice little has
been done to give consideration to specific urban HIV/Aids
matters, and ¾when it comes to settlement development
planning¾ hardly any projects/programmes have been
carried out. This is alarming as, in fact, housing, adequate
living conditions and urban governance are critical in
the success of HIV/Aids prevention (decreased transmission),
impact reduction, and support and care of those affected.
The interest of Open House International and its special
issue on “HIV/Aids and human settlement development”
lies in raising the awareness for the described situation
and in disseminating existing or potential responses to
HIV/Aids from the viewpoint of human settlements, which
can combat the pandemic through appropriate shelter, urban
planning and governance. Articles should discuss questions
regarding the dynamic relationship between human settlement
development and the HIV/Aids pandemic, and/or present
concrete solutions that help(ed) to prevent its spread,
reduce its impact, and/or support and care for those affected.
Christine Wamsler
No.4 December – Open
Issue
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