ALTERATION OF CRIME RISK LEVELS AND FORMAL ASPECT OF TYPICAL LOW-COST HOUSING DESIGN DUE TO SITE CONDITIONS AND BUILDING CODES

This article is a step forward based on the communication [9] illustrated at the XXXVII IAHS World Congress on Housing that took place October 26 – 29, 2010, in Santander, Spain. You can find the original paper in the Congress Proceedings - ISBN 978-84-693-6655-4 . Low-cost housing Institutions, as well as major investment companies, commonly reuse a typical design as a standard, in the process of rationalization and reduction of costs. The goal of this procedure is to obtain cheaper costs both in the construction and in the maintenance of an homogeneous lot of buildings. Our thesis is that, nevertheless an identical design being proposed in different towns, the final results are buildings with a different aspect. This is mainly due to the influence of building codes of the urban plan of the specific town, and to the site conditions, such as street orientation, ground inclination and so on. As a result the study offers the ability to manage the external factors on a standard design (with the afore said scale vantages) though the formal view looks different. This may be considered a further cheap vantage that aims to obtain a personalization in town design. A second, but not secondary result, comes from the evaluation of the different risk levels, under crime protection perspective, obtained by alteration of the original typical design. According to the type of alteration, crime risk levels may increase or decrease and this is an item that is getting a growing relevance in Europe where codes related to safer design of buildings are under elaboration in the last years (CEN TS 14383-3 etc. )