Housing layout, social interaction, and the place of contact in Abu-Nuseir, Jordan

This paper reports on an important concern for housing designers; that is, site design and its relationship to the social life of the community. The importance of site design including housing layout, social interaction and the place of contact was studied in the context of multiple-family housing. Residents in the town of Abu-Nuseir, a satellite community near Amman, the capital of Jordan, responded to a questionnaire about the areas near their homes and the perceived adequacy of these places for social interaction and, as a result, the development of social relationships. The study employed a house-to-house survey of households that were randomly selected. Descriptive statistics were used to analyse data. Findings demonstrate differences in the ways people use and practice interaction across six patterns of housing layouts; physical environmental forms, within the town of Abu-Nuseir. They suggest that the layout of residential buildings and the different aspects of the resulting open spaces between structures need to be distinguished. Large open spaces, for example, played a minor role, at best, in resident's perception and evaluation of the various aspects of the neighborhood. Opportunities to walk around a small group of houses or to sit in small, confined spaces, by contrast, were significantly related to social interaction and friendship formation. The data suggests that people's satisfaction with the residential setting in multiple-family housing is dependent, at least in part, on the effective use of the open spaces nearby one's residential building. This study concludes that site design, including the layout of buildings in residential neighborhoods, has profound effects upon people's behavior and communication networks. Therefore, the site plan should not be viewed by designers as simply a mechanistic tool for the laying-out of building structures. Based on the findings of this research, I believe that the designers of a residential environment have the power to facilitate social relationships by means of site plan manipulation. And, it is not the amount of open space, but the arrangement of space that helps determine the use of the area. (C) 1999 Academic Press.