Tareef Hayat Khan
Architect-Researcher
Books
Tareef Hayat Khan has so far published three books as single author, four books as co-authors with his students, and has edited two books.
Living with Transformation: Self-built Housing in the City of Dhaka
This book describes and analyzes the phenomenon of spontaneous transformation in self-built houses in the context of developing countries. After describing briefly the history of self-built houses in the context of Dhaka City, it focused on the phenomenon of spontaneous transformation. Later on, it explored the different categories of the transformation incidents inside these Self-built houses. Finally, it unfolded various explicit behavioral patterns associated with these transformations. The phenomenon of spontaneous transformation has been recognized in this book more as a behavior by not only looking at it from its physical aspects but also from the context-specific social, economic and cultural aspects as well. Houses in Transformation: Search for the Implicit Reasons
This book searched for the reasons behind spontaneous transformation in self-built houses in the context of developing countries. The self-built houses in the City of Dhaka experience spontaneous transformation in abundance. There had been searches for reasons behind this phenomenon, especially in the context of developing countries around the world. This book started with the same notion with a context specific approach. However, an ethnographic approach unveiled another dimension in search for the reasons behind transformation. It gradually tried to unfold the implicit reasons which are usually obscured by the explicit ones. It would take the reader through a journey after which spontaneous transformation in housing might no longer appear only as a physical concern in the built environment, but a tacit socio-cultural phenomenon that reveals the struggles and hustles of everyday life of ordinary households. House as interplay between Culture, Environment and Technology
This book is a product of several academic research projects conducted through different courses from undergraduate to postgraduate levels by the students of the 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 these variables in the different context and in different degrees in a way that a wide range of readers would find it interesting and useful.
Relationship between Physical Environment and Pedestrian Activities: A Study in the context of Commercial Districts in Malaysia
Pedestrian Activity is popularly associated with health issues. However, pedestrian activity has more contributions. Especially in business or commercial districts, a lot of pedestrian activity takes place. Not all of them are related to health issues. Researchers have found that pedestrian activity not only creates a buzzing vibrancy in the commercial districts but also can significantly contribute to the local security, which is also a very important issue. Therefore, there have been searches for variables which can generate and sustain such pedestrian activity. Studies show that though there are some universal variables, some of them are specific to the local context. This study searched for such variables in the physical environment, which can create and sustain such vibrancy in the context of urban commercial centers in Malaysia. With a method of observing pedestrian activity, and hypothesizing the intensity of people as the parameter of such vibrancy, this study adopted several key statistical methods to come up with some interesting findings. It showed that certain components of mixed land use patterns and streetscapes are significant to generate and sustain pedestrian vibrancy.The Effects of Culture on Non-occupancy in Public Housing: A Study in the context of Ondo State, Nigeria
Housing is ranked high among other human needs but its delivery is usually insufficient in terms of the number of stocks. If a significant number of the available ones are not occupied, it might cause unwanted waste of government resources. This study aimed at identifying the reasons for such non-occupancy in public housing, in Ondo State, Nigeria, through a user-satisfaction survey on cultural aspects. Hypothesizing that lack of cultural sensitivity in design and planning affects significantly on public housing non-occupancy, three public housing estates were investigated in three local governments. From the literature review, eight contextually significant cultural variables were selected for investigation namely: kinship relations, relaxation, food preparation, identity, security, environment and housing management, privacy, and service provisions. Results showed that the residents were satisfied with four of them, namely, kinship relations, food preparation, environment and housing management, and service provisions, but not with the others. This study insisted that careful considerations on selected context specific cultural variables are important during housing design and planning.Adding Affordability to Sustainability: A study of Environmentally Sustainable Design Elements in Housing in Malaysia
Sustainability is the major concern in today’s world. In the built environment, it has tremendous significance. Housing, as its major bulk, needs serious attention on all the three major pillars of sustainability. Turning to the environmental aspects, there are different active and passive design elements that can be incorporated into the housing. However, it varies from context to context. This book tried to identify environmentally sustainable elements of housing in the hot-humid climate in Malaysia through extensive literature review. After that, it conducted a field survey to find out the affordable ones among them which could address the big group of middle-income people in the country. With that, the study tried to find out the economic feasibility of those environmentally sustainable elements. Categorizing them as user-controlled and designer-controlled elements, results showed that several user-controlled passive and active elements were not affordable, though they had been highly regarded as sustainable elements. In the end, the study highlighted the significance of adding affordability to sustainability so that it eventually contributes to the biggest bulk in the built environment.Promoting Walkability in Historic Streets: The case of Mawlawi Street, Sulaymaniyah, Iraq
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 a 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 were 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 a 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.
Retrofitting Backlanes: A Study on Malaysian Terrace Row Housing Estates
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 the 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 by-product. In the current model of terrace row housing estates, back lanes remain as an essential part. However, recent studies showed that the relevance of back lanes are not so significant anymore. The underused back lanes in thousands of older terrace houses give a negative image of the estates. This study took the opportunity to combine these two issues, and proposed retrofitting back lanes 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 of residents, this study came up with an ideological concept of how to retrofit back lanes which can also be economically feasible. However, it went one step beyond and proposed to connect all the back lanes 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 neighborhood but also can improve the image of the neighborhood, as back lanes 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.
Architectural Methodology
Architecture is a multifaceted discipline. To some it is a socio-cultural object, to some, it is a physical object with much consideration on environmental issues, to some it is an image making element, to some architecture is about cognitive issues, to some it is a business-oriented venture, while there are others who consider it as a mixture of them. While we cannot ignore the existence of all of them dominant in architecture, we can argue that a particular perspective can provide deeper insight into the particular issue. Specific methods can be applied to investigate those issues individually without ignoring the others. Therefore, architectural methods have a very wide range. This book consists of five chapters that address few of them. It is a joint venture by the faculty staffs of the Department of Architecture, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM), where they have shared their expertise and interests on methods that can be used in Architecture. This book is consequently titled as ‘Architectural Methodology’. The five chapters were arranged in a sequence. The first chapter that searched for the symbolic meaning of built forms considered architecture as a cultural object, while the second chapter that evaluated thermal comfort of buildings considered architecture as a physical object and tangible part of the built environment. The third chapter considered architecture as a cognitive process rather than demanding it to be as a mere product. While these three chapters discussed methods of perceiving architecture from three different ontological perspectives, chapter four and five attempted slightly different approaches to investigate architectural methods. Chapter four tried to capture methods of presenting architecture from the context of design studio, which is the baking point of all ideas; while chapter five considered architecture as a part of a macro urban environment. In a way, the first three chapters can be complemented with the latter two chapters that provided the visible physical boundary that starts from where architecture is born to where they ultimately belong in the bigger context of the civilization of this world.
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