Abstract
The concept of a peaceful, individual home surrounded by greenery, built in a multistorey apartment building—a synthesis of a villa from the suburbs and an apartment in the city—is a theme very rich in possibilities for future urban development. By recognizing the positive characteristics of family houses and their application in apartment buildings, usual housing in apartment buildings gains an alternative. The first part of the paper is an analysis of the characteristics of house-like apartments: access to the apartment, private open space, three-dimensional spatial organization and visual identity. It continues with a questionnaire survey carried out among occupants living in apartment buildings in Niš, Serbia, regarding which characteristics of house-like apartments they recognize in their own apartments, if any, and how important they consider them to be for the general residential quality. It is interesting that occupants assess as significant only some basic forms of this type of apartment, while other, less obvious forms are considered to be irrelevant for the quality of housing. The results of this study include design recommendations and recommendations for the redefinition of standards that regulate the field of designing apartment buildings, in order to improve the quality of housing in the city.
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Notes
Amongst other things, it was obligatory to provide an open space within each individual housing unit, and so more than 90% of the apartments from this period in Niš have some form of open space.
This is supported by the fact that as many as a quarter of all apartments in Niš from this period have no private open space.
From the aspect of this research, it is interesting to mention that, regardless of the construction period, a huge 95% of apartments in ABs in Niš were built on one level. This indicates that both in the past and recently, local architects have rarely opted for three-dimensional spatial organization of apartments.
The typology of ABs used for the purposes of this research is the one used at the Faculty of Civil Engineering and Architecure in Niš. It includes the following types: tower blocks, urban villas, party-wall housing, gallery-access housing, corridor-access housing and double-tract housing. As there are no double-tract ABs in the territory of the city of Niš, this type does not appear as a variable.
According to current Regulations from the area of constructing apartments in Serbia (PUNPSZS 2015), it is not obligatory to anticipate private open spaces in apartments, and there is no mention of the recommended dimensions for these areas, while the Regulations for the area of subdivision and regulation (POPPRI 2011) does not allow the construction of large overhangs on buildings, which discourages the construction of larger associated open spaces (e.g. balconies).
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Stoiljković, B., Petković Grozdanović, N. & Stanković, V. Could house-like apartments improve the residential quality of a city? The case of Niš, Serbia. J Hous and the Built Environ 35, 375–396 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10901-019-09687-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10901-019-09687-7