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This study aims to trace the transformation in the form of apartment building and the connotations it has in understanding the changes that occurred in the Jordanian society’s lifestyle over the past five decades.

A comparative case study analysis has been conducted amongst 170 apartments, covering 70 design attributes related to aspects of appearance, spatial organisation, parking and access to building, outdoor space and finishing. This was followed by experts and households solicitation to help giving more confidence on the validity and reliability of findings regarding the sorts and justifications for the changes that have taken place in the form of apartments over the studied time frame.

The results reveal changes in design attributes indicating particular alterations in people’s lifestyle. New interests act in formulating recent housing design attributes. People seem to turn into a more open social life within public community but more privatised living amongst family members. People are becoming more attached to indoor modernised lifestyle, in homes and public areas where activities take place. This entails pursuing a more comfortable, facilitating and enjoyable life that presents luxury and tranquillity.

Understanding the relationship between transformations in the built form of apartment buildings and the associated social alterations provides useful insights towards improving housing provision to better match the ever-changing demands of people and respond to alterations in their lifestyles.

Individual metering and charging (IMC) allows energy costs to be apportioned among tenants in multi-apartment buildings based on their own energy use. This can result in reduced energy use due to an increased saving behaviour by tenants, which has caught the attention of the European Parliament. In the EU-directive 2012/27/EU there is a requirement for IMC to be installed by December 31, 2016 in multi-apartment buildings.

Two techniques are mentioned in the directive for IMC: individual consumption meters and individual heat cost allocators. Either of these two techniques can be used as a method to measure the supplied energy to an apartment. Another method, not mentioned in the EU-directive, is temperature metering which means that the heating cost is instead based on measurements of the actual temperatures through sensors in certain locations in the apartment. However, some shortcomings have been identified with the aforementioned methods.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how internal heat production, solar radiation, an apartment’s location within the building and local defects in the building envelope affect the accuracy of IMC. The Energy demands of three apartments in different locations within the building have been simulated in the computer program VIP-Energy. The results of energy calculations prove that the accuracy of IMC is highly questionable in some of the investigated cases. The implication of the study is that it is difficult to measure the actual heat used for an individual apartment, which obstructs accurate and fair apportioning of heating costs among individual tenants.

During the post-World War II period, Turkey's housing supply models were limited to individual housings. Three main trends in the construction industry helped overcome this limitation to a certain extent. These were cooperative societies, spontaneous squatter housing and the build-sell process. Build-sell process later became the most obvious reflection of urban transformation in the 1950s and 1960s. Within this context, this study examines the housing policy of the period and the build-sell process as well as the Rer-1 Apartment Block designed in line with the build-sell process. The Rer-1 Apartment Block was designed and implemented by architect Nejat Ersin between the years 1962-1964, and was constructed in Aşağı Ayrancı District in Ankara. This specific apartment block was examined as an extraordinary example of the build-sell process - which rejects architectural concerns and prioritises profits - as it still incorporated such concerns despite being designed adhering to logic of the build-sell process. For the purpose of this study, an oral history study was conducted with Nejat Ersin. It was, therefore, possible to evaluate Nejat Ersin's apartment block, presenting a new experience in the build-sell context, within the scope of era's social, cultural, political and economic conjecture. The Rer-1 Apartment Block was scrutinized from the build-sell process aspect within the scope of the architect's professional approach.

Even as multi-story apartment building development proposals in existing neighbourhoods represent a substantial component of policy debate at local planning boards, there is limited evidence for the impact of such residential developments on surrounding apartment values. This paper aims to address the void in knowledge, and the impact of multi-story apartment building developments on apartment values in residential high-rise areas located outside city and district centres is investigated in Helsinki Metropolitan Area, Finland.

Whether a multi-story apartment building development is followed by an increase in housing values depends on both positive and negative externalities. To specify valuation effects of proximate development projects, advanced research design combining matched sample methodology and hedonic-based difference-in-difference approach is used.

It appears from the analysis that completion of a single multi-story apartment building has an immediate positive impact on apartment values within 300 metre radius, while there is no statistically significant impact on price trend.

This paper studies apartment values only in Helsinki Metropolitan Area, Finland, and it is important to notice that local regulations and market conditions may have a notable impact on the outcomes.

This study is the first of its kind to provide with statistically significant evidence for positive impacts from multi-story apartment building development in Finnish residential high-rise areas and may have a crucial role in helping to dispel prejudices related to such developments.

The purpose of this paper is to quantify the carbon emissions emitted by two different typical apartment units representative of two different construction periods in Kosovo due to main construction materials as a consequence of embodied energy.

The present study uses a three-step (bottom-up) process-based life cycle analysis of the construction material set for two different apartment units. The current study uses material analysis. Embodied CO₂ is estimated by multiplying material masses with the corresponding ECO₂ coefficients (kg CO₂/kg). Due to the lack of a comprehensive Kosovo database, data from an international database are utilized. The results provide practical baseline indicators for the contribution of each material in terms of mass and embodied CO₂.

Results of quantitative research find that apartment unit representative of the old communist-era construction produces 50 percent more embodied CO₂ emissions than an apartment unit that is representative of modern construction in Kosovo. The study finds that this difference comes mainly because of the utilization of larger quantities of steel, concrete, and precast fabricated concrete in the apartment unit that is representative of the old communist era.

The calculation of embodied CO₂ emissions for major construction materials in typical apartments in Kosovo can help in the development of national databases in the future. The availability of such databases could help the construction industry in Kosovo to open up to new sustainable design approaches since such databases and evaluations performed in the national context in Kosovo could help the builders in selecting, assessing and using environmentally friendly materials during the design or refurbishment stage of a building.

This paper is the first investigation of the embodied carbon emission in two different typical apartment building structures in Kosovo.

The purpose of this study is to identify which are the main factors influencing the apartment prices in Prishtina, the capital of Kosovo, during the period 2018–2020. The factors identified will be used by real estate developers and investors for better decision-making in apartment investments.

The research methodology is quantitative. The methodology analyzes 1,468 real estate transaction contracts of apartment buildings using a probability random sampling. The research methodology uses multiple regression analysis to identify whether the research model is significant in predicting apartment prices but also identify which are the main factors that influence the apartment prices in Prishtina, Kosovo.

The present study finds that location, size, floor, access to road and building quality affect apartment prices in Prishtina, whereas surprisingly access to green spaces and availability of parking spaces have no statistically significant effect on apartment prices in Kosovo.

The study has great implications for the real estate developers in Prishtina, Kosovo showing how to improve their decision-making process in real estate investments to know which characteristics are most valued by investors for investment in new apartment buildings in Prishtina, Kosovo and local authorities in Prishtina, Kosovo to modernize the access to road infrastructure for its inhabitants and adopt building regulations that will enforce strict criteria as far as building quality is concerned.

The study is the first quantitative study that studies the factors influencing the apartment prices in Prishtina, Kosovo.

The purpose of this study is to quantify the energy heating performance of apartment buildings in Kosovo built after 2003 and compare it against the energy heating performance of buildings in member states of EU and selected European countries.

This paper takes a case study approach focussed on the assessment of the heating energy performance of the building. This approach facilitated a detailed calculation of the selected materials’ energy performance used in a representative building structure in Kosovo comparing with passive buildings standard and energy heating performance of buildings in member states of EU and selected European countries.

Results of quantitative research find that the energy heating performance of apartment buildings in Kosovo built after 2003 is far higher than that of passive buildings standard and is better than the average annual energy heating performance of apartment buildings in member states of the EU and selected European countries.

The research provides new knowledge regarding energy heating performance in new residential buildings in Kosovo and compares the findings with earlier research and energy consumption in other selected European countries. The research provides great benefits for researchers and practitioners working in the field of energy management as it compares the energy performance of residential buildings across Europe.

This paper provides a perspective on investigating the energy performance of a building structure of a residential apartment building in Prishtina, Kosovo. By unveiling the level of energy consumption of a residential apartment building in Kosovo representative of the new construction period can help the facility managers to acknowledge the standards they must achieve to refurbish the old building stock to achieve at least the same standard as the buildings in the new construction period.

The purpose of this paper is to examine and show why post-occupancy evaluation (POE) of public apartment buildings in Ghana as a product of design is important.

By design the paper is descriptive. It uses a literature review as a method to summarize, synthesize and show the gaps in the existing knowledge on public apartment buildings in general and Ghana in particular. These arguments are brought together in a conceptual framework for approaching POE studies.

This paper finds that gaps exist in the existing POE research knowledge regarding public apartment buildings in Ghana not only as residential settings but also as designed artifacts intended for use.

There is a need for scientific research which focus on the design and use of public apartment buildings in Ghana to provide empirical basis for design, policy and research decision-making.

This paper shows that occupants’ feedback information is important, as it can benefits government, designers and builders, building regulators and managers, as well as end users.

The paper contributes a conceptual framework based on which POE studies can be designed.

Ageing populations induce needs to adapt existing housing. With ageing, the number of frail old people, who require assistance in daily life, is also increased. Converting existing housing into assisted living enables them to remain in their community while receiving necessary support and care. The purpose is to investigate whether post-war mass housing is spatially appropriate for adaptation into group homes for older people.

The research material is attained from Finland. Spatial requirements for group homes are drawn from 130 units built or renovated during 2000–2015. Spatial characteristics of mass housing are mapped from 105 apartment buildings built in the 1970s. The latter are matched with the former by comparing the connectivity of layouts, sizes of units and the numbers and sizes of individual spaces.

Group homes typically utilize a linear layout, which can easily be created in apartment buildings. Individual spaces of a group home fit apartment buildings effortlessly. Whole group home units mostly prove to be spatially feasible but result in looser dimensioning than is typical in existing units. The mass housing stock can be considered a spatial reserve for adaptation into group homes.

This is the first study to employ a large-scale, multi-case spatial mapping approach to analyse the adaptability properties of mass housing into assisted living. The findings pertain primarily to the Finnish context, but a methodology is presented which can be applied to other countries and also to other spatial functions.

This paper aims to provide an exemplary application of an indicative post-occupancy evaluation (POE) on an organizational multistorey residential apartment building.

This research comprises of mixed qualitative and quantitative approaches. The methodology commences with a review of the recent literature, identification of performance elements, conduct of walk-through, distribution and collection of users' surveys and the development of short and long-term recommendations, where an adequate sample of users were approached for conducting a focus group interview session.

The research identifies 74 performance elements that were clustered into technical, namely (thermal, acoustic and visual comforts, indoor air quality and safety and security), functional, namely (design adequacy, finishing, furnishing, fittings and equipment and building surroundings) dimensions and behavioral, namely (apartment building attributes and managerial and logistical support). The questionnaire survey aimed to solicit users' opinions upon the occupied case study residential facility.

The research identifies areas of occupants' satisfaction and dissatisfaction in a typical multistorey residential building, as a part of a community housings for a mega organization, located in Saudi Arabia. The identification of these areas serves as a lesson learned for future developments, design considerations and implications. Hence, improving the well-being and comfort of its employees.