Tareef Hayat Khan

This book is a product of several academic research projects conducted through different courses from undergraduate to postgraduate levels by the students of department of architecture in Universiti Teknologi Malaysia. As a supervisor, I found several topics of research by my students to have potential to be published as they provided some interesting and context-specific analysis. As a result, I converted selected reports to book chapters. It was not easy to compress a big report to relatively smaller chapters without sacrificing the essence of the project. However, I think a collective effort from authors and reviewers made it possible. The focus of these research projects was housing. However, it chose three major aspects related to housing. Culture plays an intangible role in housing, environmental aspects play a relatively tangible role while technology always has an impact on the built-form and the services. The book chapters indicated the role of thees variables in different context and in different degrees in a way that a wide range of readers would find it interesting and useful.

The Pleasant walking environment is a precondition for living in a sustainable city. However, the adequacy and the quality of physical elements as the most significant components of street can seriously affect Walkability in the streets. Historically, streets were always pedestrian, but in this motor age, many of them lost that walkable environment. The objective of this study was to critically assess the Walkability of Mawlawi Street, a famous street in the historic city of Sulaymaniyah, Iraq. Qualitative interviews, Quantitative Questionnaire, and Direct Observations was conducted on four broader areas of Walkability, namely, Streetscape, Pedestrian Facilities, Road Attributes, and Walking Environment. The findings were validated through an interview with local experts. The study showed that inadequate and poor quality of street’s physical elements changed the street to an unsafe and uncomfortable environment for walking with weak and low level of street connectivity and accessibility for pedestrians. Insensitive response to Walkability can always endanger the essence of historic streets, and this study attempted to raise that concern once more.

Terrace Row Housing Estate is the major typology of housing in urban Malaysia. The model is heavily car prioritized with little or no concern on pedestrian activity. While tropical climate can be blamed for people’s lack of interest in pedestrian activity, it is already a proven phenomenon in many other parts of the world that pedestrian activity is not only good for health, but it can also generate community bonding. A strong community can ensure security inside neighborhoods as a bi-product. In current model of terrace row housing estates, backlanes remain as essential part. However, recent studies showed that the relevance of backlanes is not so significant any more. The underused backlanes in thousands of older terrace houses gives a negative image of the estates. This study took the opportunity to combine these two issues, and proposed retrofitting backlanes into pedestrian zones. In fact, this trend is getting popularized in some parts of the country as gradually people are understanding the benefits. Through a survey on residents, this study came up with an ideological concept of how to retrofit backlanes which can also be economically feasible. However, it went one step beyond and proposed to connect all the backlanes in the neighborhoods in order to create a traffic free pedestrian network. That not only can create a lively environment with children and elderlies moving freely inside the neighbourhood, but also can improve the image of the neighbourhood, as backlanes will not be considered as a black spot. That can also contribute to the property market as prices can go up due to this concept of retrofitting.