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Recognized for their high density and resources conservation, townhouses are attracting homebuyers and builders once again. With housing affordability being an issue in many nations, the interior and the exterior must be cost effective. Their proportions, however, pose a particular design challenge. The typically narrow width limit design options and the long footprint restrict the amount of light that reaches the dwelling's center.

This article presents strategies used by designers of notable townhouses with a width smaller than 6 meters to best solve those challenges. The authors studied interior design of 28 narrow units and drew conclusions about key principles that facilitated their planning. The research demonstrates that space efficiency can be achieved by employing open plans, minimizing circulation, using light colors, varying ceiling heights, suitable window placement and creative storage fixtures.

Contemporary environmental and economic factors make the construction of narrow-front townhouses a continuous attraction. As affordability is a primary concern for many homebuyers, opting to buy a townhouse can provide the cost savings they are seeking. With their dense planning pattern, building townhouses results in the reduced cost of services and land and affordability is achieved. However, limitations to community planning occur, namely, challenges to circulation and open space. These are two critical issues that need to be resolved early on; using principles and case studies, this paper will offer strategies for maximizing efficiency and functionality in communities that use townhouses as their main design feature.

In designing communities with townhouses, it is imperative to begin by paying close attention to roads and parking as well as location and content of public and private open spaces. These issues will define the character of the community. When choices are made about the location of the dwellings in conjunction with these aspects, a liveable place will emerge and the stigma associated with developments with low-cost townhouses will be alleviated. Despite the fact that townhouses are a building typology rooted in earlier centuries, its many attributes makes it relevant to our time. It preserves the advantage of private residential living, yet offers higher density and the possibility to create sustainable communities.

Once considered the ‘last frontier’, post World War II perception of a limitless North American landscape directed development into country lands. Even an apparently boundless landscape, however, had a limit. This became increasingly clear in the second half of the 20th century as suburban sprawl covered over once-fertile agricultural lands. Ecological, environmental, and social relations were negatively affected by the new residential planning pattern. Yet, positive changes can still be brought about, especially in the suburbs that border cultivated areas. This paper outlines the processes necessary for the development of sustainable suburban agriculture that can be integrated into new communities. The concepts demonstrated here can reunite ecological, economical, and social factors, which are demonstrated in a "real" project design by a team headed by the author that supports farming in a suburban Montreal, Canada, setting.

Public housing delivered in the Canadian Arctic has been ill-adapted to the social and cultural realities of Inuit communities and to northern climate. Inadequate consultation has resulted in dwellings that fails to adapt to the needs of growing families, impedes the ability of residents to engage in land-based activities, and is inappropriate for local climate. This paper examines how a user-led, flexible approach can help tailor the design of new public homes to the needs of the local housing authority and future occupants. Flexibility is incorporated into the pre-occupancy, post-occupancy and refurbishment stages of the units life-cycle, ensuring that they can be easily adapted over time. A menu of interior and exterior design components has been developed for selection by all stakeholders. The redevelopment of Widow's Row, in Iqaluit, Nunavut demonstrates how appropriate design can play a pivotal role in addressing the housing crisis.

The dry construction techniques, widely used in past centuries have seen a renewed interest in the last few years. This is due to different reasons such as the new user’s needs for high quality at low cost, the shortage of traditional skilled labor, the need to reduce delivery times and the rising costs of initiating a fabrication plant.

Dry construction methods regard the building site as the place of assembly. The quality of the finish products, are guaranteed by a factory controlled production process and reduction to a minimum of on-site work. The building, designed by “unconnected boxes” becomes an “active machine”, capable of ensuring maximum performance for the user. Finally the design of an “open building system” also consists of a set of rules to allow creation of various solutions.

The complexity of this modus operandi increases progressively if the intervention is carried out in small historic centres. Therefore, this research aims at presenting a method of work that uses dry construction systems and that has been developed to intervene in the historic contexts damaged by the earthquake that struck the Abruzzo region on April 6, 2009.

This method develops a process that aimes at the rehabilitation of the buildings but also at improving their energy behavior while respecting, at the same time, the vernacular values. It is based on a “case by case” approach that starts from an analysis of the context and its local construction techniques, taking into account the peculiarities of each location. The results of this method have been applied to a small village located in the province of L'Aquila called Santa Maria del Ponte.

The concept of employing web-based configuration systems towards mass customization of housing has been implemented by some prefabricated housing companies around the globe, and has become a challenging research area in the last few decades as an outcome of advancements in communication and design technologies. Different methodologies have been employed with the aim of efficiently engaging future homebuyers in the design of their homes. The thrust of this paper is to systematically formalize an advanced configuration system for mass customization of prefabricated housing for a company operating in the Canadian market. The focus is on one floor bungalows which are common within the Province of Quebec. Such housing models targets a specific market sector; elderly couples seeking retirement homes, with the aim of improving affordability through maintaining particular design and production qualities.

A common practice in some of North Americans' residential development is to alter the site's natural conditions prior to and during construction. Rock formations are removed or changed, new terrain grading created, and landscape features uprooted. An approach whereby the design will be made to fit the site's characteristics is often avoided.

Fitting a master plan of a new community to existing geo-environmental conditions was a principal objective in the planning of a 350-dwelling development on a 41-hectare site near Quebec City, in the province of Quebec, Canada. For the densely forested site, the author developed design guidelines that considered the roads' routes, parking areas, foundation, and footprint of each building. A pillar of this approach was to model the design after the terrain's condition by adopting flexible planning strategies.

The project, now in advanced stages of construction, have earned many accolades from conservationists and demonstrated that once documentation of the site's natural conditions has taken place, the fitting of design to the site becomes easier to implement.

This paper outlines the design challenges, show patterns that were developed specifically for the project and elaborate on the building process and its outcome.

Decision Making for Flexibility in Housing

Architecture, at its very essence, is the process of providing physical space and place for human activity. Primarily concerned with responding to the specific needs of users and their societies, the built environment plays a tremendous role in shaping and facilitating the every day world we live in. Although being inextricably concerned with this man-environment dynamic, architecture however seems to limit its mainstream practices, education and standards to the conventional spectrum of “normal”. This leaves numerous user groups and victims of social circumstances largely excluded from the luxury of an architecture that deems itself specifically to serve them.