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Reinventing High-Rise Residential For lower Class People

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STUDENT URN NUMBER 6288714

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MODULE NUMBER PSYM076 ASSIGNMENT TITLE Dissertation Proposal

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WORD COUNTS xxxx

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Introduction There had been quid a research regarding the matter of the way people live in the high rise building. Most of them resulting the way that living there creating many bad outcomes (Gifford, 2007). In many kinds of situation, most of the occasion, this situation happens in a low type budget of housing. The main big difference that is easily noticeable is the way that those buildings are designed, the simplest explanation the way the are difference is the budgeting of the user itself, so in a way it will affect the way the types of the feature of facility of the building.

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This all may sounds does not have a strong relation between all the bad things about living in a high rise residential, but this is one of the factor that is quite important the way people chose where they live, which is Satisfaction. There are a study about types of fear that people have to face with the condition of high rise situation. The first fear to face is how the believe about suicide, they might have the tendency to think how their friend, family or loved one might jump out of the window. The second one is related to incident, imagine there is a fire or an earthquake, and you live on the 10th floor, and imagine to get to the ground floor safely with all the rush getting to safety, that will be something that will be hard to do. The third fear is about the fear of stranger. The concept of living in a a high rise residential, is the way it maximise the amount of people living in one space. What lead after people start getting afraid of new people or in a way it can be called stranger, s/he starts to they start to suspect of people doing crime. The last one is about how they fear that someone might attack the whole building, the act of a terrorist, in a way it leads to the second fear about living in higher rise (Gifford, 2007).

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The knowledge of architecture is not only about how designing a beautiful building, but it is actually more about that. Designing a house can be easy, but designing home use a whole new world. Being an architect not only responsible on how the window looks like, where to put the bedroom, but it is actually a lot more than that, because imagine, by designing a public space, people can meet with other, talk and socialise, in a way it create some sort of ecosystem in the way it works in two way, a good environment is the place where people and the environment work harmoniously. There is a saying that there is no point in designing a

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building or a house or even designing a master plan for a city, there will be no point if an architect design a living space without considering any human being who will be living there.

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In order to achieve the best design, there and to be a strong connection between the designer and the one who use it. The problems that people are having living in the high rise building, in this particular study, most of them live in the place where they do not feel at home, the place where you can say that is your place.The idea of this study is to explore how to reinvent the way living in the high rise building, but especially for the low budgeted type which usually feels unsatisfied with the where they live. By doing an this research, the stigma of living in a high rise is a terrible idea to be lived in, hence by completing this research we can make a better home for people in high rise.

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Literature Review There is one particular article who focused on how people live in the high rise environment, which written by Robert Gifford (The consequence of living in a High-Rise Building). The journal was written based on many study conducted in the same field. The reason why there are so many study done about this topic, because there are actually a lot of area that is needed to be discovered and also to add, there are practically abundant of factors that play role in this environment.

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What we can get from reading the article, living in a high rise is not an ideal way of living. For adults living in a high rise does not really have strong impact, not for younger children who experiencing growing up in that environment, it is unsuitable place to grow up for them (Conway & Adams, 1977), note only living there can contribute a stress, but also children play obviously affected by it. In what way growing up for youngster is unsuitable, let us imagine a scenario where a we act as a parent who live in an apartment, we live on the highest floor, and have a 5 years old boy/girl, and imagine when s/he plays outside of the room, roaming around the apartment hall/lobby, meeting stranger, horrifying is the best word to describe your feeling when this situation is actually happen. There are two option for kids to grow up in a high rise, the first one is the over protective parents who does not let their kid

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go outside to play at all without any parent supervision, which may lead into poor social skills development, and lets just say that the kids might have trouble in their adult time socialising with other people. The other scenario is the opposite way, unsupervised children, no one watch they play, and it leads to a lot of different things, it depends on the environment itself, if it is good, s/he can be turns out good, but if it is not, children tend to have more behavioural problem growing up there (Richman, 1977)

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The other downside of living in a high rise building, it affect people on their social skill, most of the people have poor social skills (Korte & Huismans, 1983). This is may be the results from over protective parents, in results of isolation, leads to no friends (Yancey, 1971). There is always an exception for everything, people who live in high rise might have friends, but they tend to pick friends from outside of the apartment (Michelson, 1977). Another study shows that people that live in high rise resident have more acquaintances' than the one who live on the lower one, but not the same case with the number of friends they have (Churchman & Ginsberg, 1984).

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Most of the problem that people are having are space related problem. To elaborate on this problem, fear of crime or a stranger, it may because that you do not have a defensible space, or in a way that it gives you not save in that space. Although in some of the apartment, most of have some public space for people to mingle, but in reality most people felt that it is lacking of semi-public space and facilities for it (Yancey, 1971).

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There is always a good side about high rise environment, the reason why there are quite a lot of interest in people in having this type of residential. This type of housing is quite good in a way that it saves a lot of space in term of the number of people lives in one area, this type really fits into the really dense city, where having lots of space for a house is not an option. When you live in the big city, you might feel overwhelmed by how dense is everything around you, but if you live in an apartment, it might gives you different experience for this scenario, why? Because there are a relation between the crowding and the height of the place where you live (Mandel, Baron Fisher, 1980), the idea how this works in crowding, because

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the higher floor you live in, in a way that you are getting separating from the earth, and that simply means that you are not attached with the situation of crowding in the ground level.

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Research Design and Method The main problem that that people are facing is they do not feel that they do not feel in their home in their high rise environment, hence it re create the other problem like a domino effect. If they can feel their actually living in a home, not just a space where they sleep and eat, any daily ordeal that usually becomes a trouble will be more easier to be handled. Like for example the way to handle fear of the stranger, can be because from not knowing your neighbour, learning from the experience of a type of housing of a lower rise housing, usually they know their neighbour better (in some cases this is not always works the same), and other resource to resolve this problem is to make the environment itself easy to be monitored, so it will reduce the amount of paranoid parents

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The method to reinvent the way of people live in a high rise environment require not only better facilities inside of or outside the apartment, design of the building or even the environment itself, but also we have to alter some of the behaviour that might endanger the balance of the new environment.in order to achieve all of this changes. Each of every individual in this world has each own interpretation on what is home is all about, everybody has its own understanding, the problem is, based on there definition, some of them might have a conflict with each other, which might lead to another problem, the question for now, how to solve this problem? Technically there will be no perfect environment for everybody in this world, to create something that is universal but every body okay with it is practically almost impossible thing to achieve.

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Although it is something hard to achieve, there is still a way to reinvent the way that architect design a high rise building into a better high rise building. The other big main difference in term of the way it was built, from an apartment and your usual house is that, you can do pretty much have anything you want on your house, but sometimes if you live in an apartment, you will have to stick into a few of plans that the owner have for you, so in a way it is not too personalised. In order to get better idea of what is better living environment,

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there will have to be an extensive study on the way of people live. The most important thing to have is not about fancy facilities in the building, but more importantly how the make the user feel comfortable in or around the building.

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To achieve this the kind of data that is needed is a study on comparison between a high rise and low rise residents, and try to see the their idea of what is a perfect home is all about. In order to get all of the essence the study is, observation of a living environment is needed. Because the idea of this study is to reinvent from something that is not working perfectly, so this study is based on the model of an already existing high rise building, and to redesign its feature to maximise the satisfaction factor by doing a direct observation to the user and to figure out the bad gene of the building, and try to eliminate all of it by fixing its architecture feature or even rearranging the user behaviour throughout the space.

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The participants of this study, it has to be ranging from the youngest until the oldest user of the space it self. The data that is needed on this study is what is an ideal home for the user, and what is the ideal environment for it. The participants can be divided into roughly 4 division, youngster (age 5 - 10 years old), teenager (11 - 17 years old), Adult (18 - 60), and the last one is elderly (above 60). The reason the participants is divided into these groups, because all of them will be having different take on what is home for them, by making it groups it will be much easier to see their needs to achieve an ideal living environment.

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The methods that is used to collect this data is by using questionnaire, interview and direct observation to the existing environment, study how they behave in a certain public space inside of the building.After all of the data had been gathered, all of them are analysed the way that how the space affect their behaviour and how they try to shape the environment from their behaviour. After all of them had been analysed, we can try to take a summary or a conclusion and try to relate them to the study or literature that had been done and try to formulate a new design to cope with the existing problem.

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Because there will be a lot of data that has to be collected, so analyse all of them is going to become something hat is hard to do, not to mention, to analyse these data, there are a lot of factors to consider to, gender, age, education background, salary, culture, religion, and many more, hence by doing this study may solve one particular problem, in one specific environment, but the solution may not work with other places, because different user, required different needs. This study will not only be a waste of effort studying in one specific environment, it is still viable to be used for other places, but there will be some more adjustment with the user and the new built environment.

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Theoretical Framework Most of the study and the research that had been done in this area, mostly are discussing how the environment can affect to the human behaviour and life to some point. Many studies show that living in the high rise residential has much more of negative impact rather than positive impact. In many cases most of the high-rise does not work at all, although it is not the case for the high-end version of the residential, which usually works, but if we analyse it in deeper perspective, we are going to find out the aspect which is not working.

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In certain cases in high-rise residential (low budgeted version) in Indonesia, most of the residents are not originally from the area, most of them are people coming from outside of the city. And the reason why they are there, they are originally relocated from an illegal housing, some of them coming from the riverbank housing, and many more illegal area where it is a government property, and it was not intended for a housing area. sSimply, there will be no more problem for those people who got relocated into the new places by the government. The problem that may arise from that scenario is that, let us take an imaginary example of this case, lets say there is a slump called john slump area, if we imagine all of the activities that is happening there mostly one dimensional in a way that everything works fine, but to us it may looks unorganised and for outsider like us it is impossible for us to live in that kind of environment.

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One thing that is good about living there, people there know their neighbour, they have stronger interpersonal networks of neighbours, not like higher class of people, that in a way

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we can say does not really care about knowing or getting in touch with their neighbours (Bott, 1957; Young and Wilmott, 1957; Gans, 1962; Fried and Gleicher, 1961; Fried, 1963; Suttles, 1968). We already know that everything actually working in that environment, every house has its own link to each neighbour, everyone feels connected, although from physical experience, it will be very tight for them, but they feel very open about it. What is about to be a mistake is, when they are relocated, everything is changed. The concept of high rise

building is simply to pile everything to save the space for housing, in a way it breaks all of the links and the connection between each households there. How? In a recent condition of the building for the lower class of people, the building itself does not really designed well, so they are missing their public space where they chat gossiping about their neighbour, talking about recent event, and missing the space for them just to have a good time. Most of the space in the building are designed to be economically, everything was meant to be efficient, but in reality it is not working at all, hence it is normal for people to feel stress living there, and to some point feels that they have to move out from there (Adianto, 2012)

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The fear that people are experiencing, most of them are related to the idea of stranger. If we look at the design of the building, the distance from each households is extremely close, but that is not the case for people in getting know each other, despite the fact that they are only separated by wall, they may not know each other. Parents may become overprotective to their children, children may do not friends at all, leads to the poor social relationship amongst the neighbourhood (Gifford, 2007). The most logical reason to see why all of these are happening are because they choose not to socialise, they are too afraid in knowing their own neighbour. The question is for now, does it is coming from the way their culture shaping their behaviour, or it is coming from the effect of living in the high rise residential building?

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Reference

Gifford, Robert (2007). "The Consequences of Living in High-Rise Buildings". Architectural science review (0003-8628), 50 (1), p. 2. Mandel, David R., Baron, Reuben m., Fisher, Jeffrey D. (1980) Room Utilisation and Dimension of Density: Effects of Height and View Vliet, Willem van (1983) Families in Apartment Buildings: Sad stories for Children?. Environment and Behaviour. William L. Yancey (1971). Architecture, Interaction, and Social control: The case of a Large-Scale Public Housing Project. Environment and Behaviour.

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