Affordable Honeycomb Housing: For Every Home, a Private and a Shared Garden

As cities grow, land becomes scarcer and dearer. In Malaysia, terrace houses in the cities and suburbs are already out of the financial reach of most people. They must make do with high-rise housing, but even these are increasingly expensive.
With increasing prosperity, car-ownership spirals, congesting main arteries, dominating neighbourhood streets and discouraging other activities - walking, cycling, children’s outdoor play, and casual social interaction – making low-rise neighbourhoods less vibrant. As for high-rise housing, it has always been associated with social ills.
Is this trend of homes becoming less affordable and neighbourhoods becoming more sterile inevitable? Are there any design alternatives to terrace houses and high-rise blocks that can make housing socially better and affordable?
This book offers the optimistic prospect that courtyard homes - with private and shared gardens in front of them – can create an environment is that more community-friendly. That these courtyard neighbourhoods can be created in both low-rise as well as high-rise situations. That these houses and neighbourhoods can be designed in a cost-efficient way so that these courtyard homes can be affordable to as many as possible.
Pie in the sky? Not quite…
Several affordable low-rise projects have already been completed or are in the pipeline. We are also working to commercialize our R&D that extend the ideas first developed for low-rise to various types of high-rise housing projects.