Open House International

Wilkinson, Nicholas

2007 Open House International

doi: 10.1108/OHI-01-2007-B0001

2006 was our 30th year of publication - quite a feat considering that our financial muscle is dependent on a relatively small group of subscribers and seven institutional subscribers. Like a poor distant Elsevier relative we had no cash to have a party or to give away subscriptions but we did look around and say that we had achieved a lot with some color issues, a web site and some double length issues. In 2006, Open House International was covered by the Thomson ISI products namely, The Social Science Citation Index, The Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Social Sci-Search, Current Contents/Social & Behavioral Sciences, Current Contents/Arts & Humanities and Journal Citation Reports / Social Sciences Edition. This was a kind of 30th birthday present. It must not be overlooked that this success was not without the unfailing support of our Board of Editors (referees) and guest editors of theme issues who have maintained the highest standards of editing through their rigorous approach to the written words of authors and to referencing and citation levels of author's manuscripts. My job, more managerial by nature, has been and still is to ensure that timely publication is maintained and that a healthy flow of quality articles is achieved. Without all these attributes citation index rating cannot be considered.

Friedman, Avi

2007 Open House International

doi: 10.1108/OHI-01-2007-B0002

Once considered the ‘last frontier’, post World War II perception of a limitless North American landscape directed development into country lands. Even an apparently boundless landscape, however, had a limit. This became increasingly clear in the second half of the 20th century as suburban sprawl covered over once-fertile agricultural lands. Ecological, environmental, and social relations were negatively affected by the new residential planning pattern. Yet, positive changes can still be brought about, especially in the suburbs that border cultivated areas. This paper outlines the processes necessary for the development of sustainable suburban agriculture that can be integrated into new communities. The concepts demonstrated here can reunite ecological, economical, and social factors, which are demonstrated in a "real" project design by a team headed by the author that supports farming in a suburban Montreal, Canada, setting.

Bornstein, Lisa

2007 Open House International

doi: 10.1108/OHI-01-2007-B0003

This article explores why a massive effort to promote peace, democratic governance, economic recovery, and poverty-reduction in Mozambique produced social, economic and spatial fragmentation in urban areas. Drawing on the experience of several Mozambican cities in the immediate post-war period, the article shows how international peace-building, economic transition, and decentralised governance had unintended consequences that fragmented and fractured urban areas. Interdictory spaces, distorted housing markets and widespread corruption are among the features of the urban landscape fostered by these post-war transitional processes. In contrast to the profound effects of wider forces on urban spatial, social and political relations, efforts to plan the cities have been strikingly ineffective. Possible causes for this failure are discussed and include the high levels of donor dependence, internal political struggles over the role of planning, the limited levels of political enfranchisement, and the conceptual basis of contemporary planning. The article concludes with discussion of the challenges to planning for urban settlements that better meet the needs of the Mozambican people.

Park, Jin-Ho

2007 Open House International

doi: 10.1108/OHI-01-2007-B0004

This paper presents the design exploration of a studio conducted at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. The study began with the premise that high-rise housing in Honolulu is not a viable solution within such a unique natural and urban setting. Students have challenged the issue by testing and experimenting on a variety of distinct housing alternatives within the studio. The studio then introduced some pedagogical agenda of housing to students and required an analytical project that focused on the dwelling and its collective form to elucidate fundamentals of housing design. This study laid the groundwork of each student's design development throughout the project, upon completion a variety of different designs and solutions were proposed responded to distinct themes and problems. In this article, different types of housing prototypes and their distinctive clustering as a unique urban village as a whole are shown, and the final model of the studio as a collective form is presented. In conclusion, the pedagogical value of the design studio is discussed.

Berköz, Lale; Kellekçi, Ömer Lütfi

2007 Open House International

doi: 10.1108/OHI-01-2007-B0005

It is often necessary to assess the satisfaction of the house users with the house environment, in other words the compliance of the environment with their expectations, needs and goals.The quality of residence and environment affects the general life satisfaction of the human. If the residents are satisfied with their residences and residence environments, this influences their psychological and physical health and these all together have an impact on the structure of the society. Therefore if the variables influencing the satisfaction of the people with their housing environment are known, this will aid us to set the criteria for the design of the housing and its environment. The aim of this study is to define the expectations of mass housing users from the houses and their environment and to assess the satisfaction of Bahcesehir Mass Housing users with the area they live in. The needs and expectations of families with different ages, cultures, educational backgrounds and income levels have been analyzed and the kinds of conditions necessary for satisfaction have been defined.The factors necessary for the satisfaction of the users with the houses and their environment have been determined on the basis of the collected information about the features of the household, the houses and the house environment.The survey within the scope of this study was carried out through 400 questionnaires. 327 of them were filled out in multi-family houses and 73 in single-family houses.The findings of this study show that, not only the quality of the residence but also the environment of the residence is important. Residential environment constitutes not only the physical components of the residential area but also social and economic factors.The assessments within this study will serve as a guide for future studies aiming to increase the quality of mass housing by taking the wants and needs of the mass housing users into consideration.

Somma, Paola

2007 Open House International

doi: 10.1108/OHI-01-2007-B0006

In 1993, US Congress launched the Urban Revitalization Demonstration program, later to become known as HOPE VI, a national plan whose declared aim was to transform public housing stock into "bridges of opportunities".In the following decade, Hope VI has awarded grants to demolish public housing projects and replace them with "attractive developments that not only blend with but enhance the surrounding community while providing housing for families of all incomes" (HUD, 1999). In 1995, Congress repealed the one-for-one replacement requirement and de facto Hope VI was turned primarily into a demolition program.In 2003, the American Dream Downpayment Act re-authorised the Hope VI program throughout the fiscal year 2006. It now seems that the federal government has no intention to continue its financing.Despite the extensive debate on the program, a comprehensive analysis of the social, economic and political process underlying the transformation of all the specific sites and a systematic overview of the stories behind these projects, from the first decision to build to the decision to raze are not available.An atlas with a description of the sites, based on qualitative secondary sources (planning and architecture magazines, urban history and geographic history journals, local authorities reports), and three maps for each of them - before and after the public housing project and after Hope VI, could prove to be very useful. Such a tool would indeed provide the context for an interdisciplinary reflection of how the city affects and is affected by a multitude of variables with particular emphasis on the political controversies on location, and the role of different players - city council, public housing authorities, developers, community residents, unions, the media. At the end, city is "history condensed".Being impossible for a single researcher to complete such a body of work, this paper intends to make a contribution to the existing literature and focus on the projects built between 1933 and 1949, now demolished or in the way to be demolished in 58 cities, "thanks" to Hope VI (1).

Bellal, Tahar; Saighi, Ouafa

2007 Open House International

doi: 10.1108/OHI-01-2007-B0007

This study is addressing the widespread transformation activities made to government-built housing intended for low income urban households. These unauthorised self-help transformation activities indicate not only people's willingness to become actively involved in the housing process but also demonstrate the potential for low income families to invest to improve their living conditions. In this paper we examine the changes made to the internal layouts of multi-story walk-up flats in the recently implemented satellite town of "Ali Mendjeli" in Constantine which is one of the newly adopted solutions to ease Constantine saturated city centre, and also to respond to an acute housing shortage. These transformation activities have an effect on dwelling size, cultural norms, and internal maintenance. A survey has been conducted in selected projects and socio-economic data has been collected from a sample of dwellings. The findings of the study point to the factors, which encourage these transformations, help to understand the motives and means used by the residents in the transformation procedure, find out the characteristics of these transformations, and assess means, which can be used to plan for future transformations in proposed housing schemes. Thus, this paper tends to understand the alterations carried out by the users, and to propose recommendations in order to attenuate this phenomenon.

Yürekli, Ipek; Inceoglu, Arda

2007 Open House International

doi: 10.1108/OHI-01-2007-B0008

This study suggests that although there are no apparent clues in the built environment of informal housing settlements developed by immigrants from rural areas, urbanization processes lead to acculturation. It is possible to trace this transformation by utilizing semantic tools.Istanbul has experienced a major population increase due to immigration from rural areas in the last two decades. Most buildings in the areas developed by these new citizens appear to be impermanent and unfinished. This study suggests that regarding to the evaluation of such settlements some of the widely accepted assumptions may not be valid, and new ways of understanding involved processes are necessary. This study suggests acculturation occurs in such areas, contrary to the general belief held until the end of 1990's. These processes are explained with the semantic model of the ‘home’ suggested in this study. This is a temporal and ‘living’ model, based on the idea that as a result of processes of urbanization people's meanings associated with their homes change. This model is used as a tool to predict these changes in the meanings and explain them in relevance with processes of acculturation. The results of the study are expected to contribute both to semantic research and research on illegal settlements.

Ilter, Tugrul

2007 Open House International

doi: 10.1108/OHI-01-2007-B0009

This article engages with the question of the otherness of cyberspace, VR, and hypertext, and how they are distinguished as "new" from "the traditional." It begins by noting how this "new" present is distinguished by familiar binary oppositions like now vs. past and modern vs. traditional which rely on the notion of a new that is uncontaminated by the old. Both our enthusiasm for the singularly liberating nature of this new future as cybertechnophiles, and our Luddite resistance to its singularly fascistic and panoptic encirclement are similarly informed by this binary opposition. The paper then notes how the other in this opposition is a "domestic other." Thus we always-already know what the other is all about. Arguing that if the other were radically other and not "domesticated," one could not give an account of it in this way, the paper concludes that such alterity requires a rethinking of how one knows the other. The difference between this "wild" other and the "domestic" other is not an external difference but is radical; it is at the root. Therefore, our notions of space, reality, and text need to be complicated and rethought to accommodate what they seem to oppose: cyberspace, virtual reality, and hypertext.

Hürol, Yonca; Lizarralde, Gonzalo; Hilton, Keith

2007 Open House International

doi: 10.1108/OHI-01-2007-B0010

THE ARCHITECTURE OF HAPPINESSMANAGING URBAN DISASTERSHOMEWORKS - A NEW AMERICAN TOWNHOUSE