Impact of the Built Environment on the Mental Health of the Inhabitants in High-Rise Collective Housing in Algeria

For everybody, the house or the accommodation （and its environment） is a secure place, a haven space, which protects people from constraints of the everyday life. Unfortunately, and more or less everywhere in the third world, accommodation is for a great number of people a source of stress caused by daily obligations that people have to deal with. In Algeria, the majority of the high-rise collective housing estates through the country offers all the ingredients of a constrained urban environment for the inhabitants. For the most of the population, the accommodation appears as a vital need rather than a negotiable good. As a matter of fact, in the third world in general and particularly in Algeria, most of people live in communities where there is a shortage of accommodation and in which the social housing and its environment are often below the standards. Constructed on policies and a conception of housing which does not integrate at all the criteria of the sustainable development, millions of fiats have already been built. Millions are going to be built in the future, and will be of high-rise collective type. As underlined in this paper, it seems reasonable to think that such a degraded built environment will be unfavorable to the inhabitants and will have a negative impact on both their mental and physical health. The attempt is to demonstrate that there are evidences according to which the housing conditions, inside and outside the accommodation, contribute to create psychological distress and physiological diseases.

Promotion and Renewal of the Outdoor Environment of the Collective Housing That Promotes Health <br/>—Based on the Post-Epidemic Perspective

The COVID-19 is a major global health event that has changed people’s lives and behaviors. As a fragile and sensitive area with high population density and poor living conditions in the city, collective housing is also an important construction area for future urban renewal. In the process of the spread of the new crown epidemic, the collective housing has exposed a series of weaknesses such as difficult community management, inconvenience of life, and insufficient outdoor space. Therefore, the update and transformation of the outdoor environment of the collective housing combined with the concept of public health is a problem that must be considered at present. This article combines the practice of renewal and transformation of the X community in Chaoyang District, Beijing, combined with survey methods such as questionnaires, interviews, and observations, combined with the needs of residents and the practical experience of the grassroots management unit, and carried out an overall renewal design of the external space environment of the collective housing. The epidemic is combined with the division of functional layout, refined design of outdoor activity space to ensure safe distance, and increased shared smart facilities to improve the quality of the outdoor environment of collective residences and strengthen community resilience;to achieve communication and sharing, epidemic prevention and control on the basis of ensuring safe social distance outdoor sports and other functions. In this way, the ability of collective housing to prevent, identify, and dispose of urban risks will be improved, and will provide residents with a better and livable community life.

Poverty Decentralization or Reconcentration: An Empirical Study of the Effects of Collected Public Rental Housing in Changzhou, Jiangsu Province

Based on the supply-side reform objective, it is a great transformation of housing welfare measures in China to collect private unoccupied houses as public rental housing instead of building new ones. Through an empirical study of the Collecting Houses as Public Rental Housing Program in Changzhou, this paper finds that the collected houses is relatively scattered in the city, which is beneficial to avoiding over-centralization and marginalization of the poor families. However, it has resulted in poverty reconcentration in some old communities, probably further leading to spatial solidification of the poor as well as a further decline of old communities. Therefore it may not effectively solve the housing problems of the poor population by providing this alternative public rental housing, which is collected according to economic efficiency. Accordingly, the paper argues that it is necessary to reinforce community development and to renovate the declined communities in time, as an important supplement to housing welfare improvement.

A study on courtyard apartment types in South Korea from the 1960s to 1970s

In the 1960s, when apartments were being introduced in South Korea and were not yet standardized, diverse attempts at construction were made. However, due to factors such as the preference for houses that face south, apartment planning principles were unified. The present study intended to find out characteristics that can be applied to the current demands by studying cases of experimental plans among apartments, understanding the plans of courtyard apartments and classifying the cases into different types. The types of 29 courtyard apartments constructed in 1960-1970s in Seoul were analyzed. The apartments were classified into complex types that refer to cases where many buildings form a courtyard, block types, and open types. 2017 Higher Education Press Limited Company. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of KeAi. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license

The panopticon prison as a “social condenser”:The study of the project for De Koepel prison by Rem Koolhaas/OMA (1979e1988)

Rem Koolhaas/OMA carried out the study for De Koepel prison throughout a decade(1979-1988).However,only its initial stages(1979-1980)were disclosed and have been investigated.The hypothesis presented in this article suggests that Koolhaas implemented his dthend recent thesis present in Delirious New York(1978)on“life in the metropolis”and the“Culture of Congestion”in the conception and design of this project.Thus,this article has the aim of examining dby means of the documents compelling the entire period of the studyd how the project suggested transforming the domesticity of De Koepel prison into a“social condenser”of the contemporary metropolis.By doing so,it makes it possible to consider the role of this project within the first decade of Koolhaas’career as an architect(1978-1989),and to establish that Delirious New York is,in fact,the theory on which it was based on when first conceived.This project anticipated the strategy and the methodology he implemented,at a later time,in other projects,offering a different perspective.On this occasion,this diagrammatic investigation took place in Bentham’s Panopticon;reason why,he was then able to develop the reflections on heterotopias and prisons carried out by Foucault.