CONCLUSIONES Y RECOMENDACIONES

Good quality design of housing and its environment means that a residential environment satisfies both aesthetic and practical conditions, reflecting local identities and characteristics, and also following the national design standard for well-designed housing and neighbourhoods, such as ‘Building for Life’ (BfL) (CABE, 2010, DCLG, 2015, DCLG, 2011, BfL, 2015).

Throughout the new residential boom and burst in global city centres, accompanied with the rise of young, creative urban professional singletons, many commentators (Haughton, 2010, Punter, 2010a, Simmons, 2009, Hall, 2013) maintained that the qualities of the residential environment and implementation of planning in particular was disappointing, and this opinion has been strongly put forward after the global recession in 2007. Scholars argue that there have been several reasons for the poor quality. First, the planning and housing design were subjected to diverse pressures to satisfy increased demands of city redevelopment to build faster and to extract as much housing and profit as possible (Punter, 2010b). Second, although the relevant planning and agenda were visionary, strategic and effective enough to deal with the multiple pressures and demands, the preference for entrepreneurialism in the housing sector such as focusing on the ‘buy-to-let’ market outstripped the statutory planning (Hall, 2013). Many of house builders and investors rarely focused on long-term design qualities of the plans, and were only interested in the development for short-term financial profits through plausible design.

These kinds of ‘trade developers’ were negligent in the aspects of sustainability, public community space, flexible unit styles and far-reaching perspectives of design quality (Punter, 2010a). Thus the intended impacts of planning and design quality were weakened, and the quality of the city centre housing district decreased.

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In particular, in the case of the UK context, one-fifth of the new houses built during the property boom had serious building problems, and almost one-third of the new home plans and housing did not fully satisfy the design criteria of Building for Life (BfL) (CABE, 2005a, CABE, 2005b, CABE, 2007). The BfL design criteria include 20 questions which are used to assess the quality of housing environment, and the 20 criteria are classified into four main perspectives:

‘Environment and community’, ‘Character’, ‘Street, parking and pedestrianisation’ and ‘Design and construction’ (BfL). Many commentators (Design for London, 2007, Haughton, 2010, Simmons, 2009, Punter, 2010a) were concerned with the situation encompassing the low quality of buildings, poor energy efficiency of housing, lack of amenities, public and green space, and negative feedback of human relationship among neighbourhoods. Moreover, the general design flaws during the period were poor space standards, an excessive number of dwellings for single persons, inflexible property types, a poor level of sustainable design, and excessive car parking spaces (Simmons, 2009) (see Figure 3-16). For example, city centre dwellers who live in apartment housing have been forced to give up the backyard dream (Meadows, 2015) and there was a case of poor quality public space use in Leeds that the space which was designed to use community space for residents and local communities currently used for car park space (Haughton, 2010) (see Figure 3-16). In this situation, the urban planning and housing design have failed to meet the expected quality of development in dealing with the rise of young professional singletons, social exclusion, intensification, and sustainable development.

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Figure 3-16 Poor Quality Housing Designs: Inflexible Residential Unit Types, Lack of Green Space (Left) (Meadows, 2015) and Poor Public Space and Excessive Car Parking Space

(Right) (Haughton, 2010).

Poor Quality of Housing Environment: the Case of Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo

In addition to the UK case, there is a proper Asian example - Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo – that lays emphasis on the poor quality of housing environment, particularly small sized housing for the young single person households, developed during the property boom. During the 20^th century Japan experienced significant urbanization, economic development and property boom, accompanied with rapid population growth (Okata and Murayama, 2011). In particular, Tokyo experienced urban redevelopment during the bubble economy in the 1980s, and construction of small sized residential buildings such as studio flats was prevalent in the central area of the city in order to accommodate the rise of young and professional single person households (ibid).

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Nakagin Capsule Tower can be a good example of small-sized housing for the young singletons in central areas. As shown in Figure 3-17, the mixed-use tower, providing both residential units and offices is located in Shimbashi, Tokyo. The building consists of 140 individual capsule apartments which are designed for single person households who work in the city (Ouroussoff, 2009).

Despite its experimetal architecture aiming to satisfy the need of the rising demographic population in the city, several limitations have emerged in terms of design qualities. One of the most crucial weaknesses is ‘small size’. Although the ‘capsule size’ is an important notion of the building, it is clear that living spaces for many residents are not big enough, resulting in appliances and personal belongings spreading out to the narrow passages as seen in Figure 3-18 (Chapman, 2012). In addition to the size issue, other dissatisfactions include poor maintenance, the noise problem and disconnected human relationships among dwellers (ibid).

Figure 3-17 Exterior and Interior of the Nakagin Capsule Tower (Source:http://www.slate.com/blogs)

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Faced with the affordability crisis and poor quality of housing environment in the global city centres, stakeholders including governments, policy makers, urban designers, planners and architects have been committed to improve the socio-economic and architectural design issues, considering the needs of the young singletons who live in the city centre. One visible outcome of the commitments is an emergence of micro-apartments in the central area (Palmer, 2006, Kang et al., 2011), and the issues of this new housing type will be explored in section 5.