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The proposed definitional framework can be used to define housing typologies of cities in developing countries. It aims to define housing typologies in the capital city of Albania, Tirana, using the proposed hierarchical framework within the dynamics of four political periods: Ottoman, establishment, socialist and postsocialist.

This study proposes a new definitional approach for the housing typologies through a hierarchical framework that defines the typologies based on their political period and legality statuses departing from the case of Tirana, which is featured by a heterogeneous context. Such context is characterized by uncontrollable urban development, making typology definition problematic. Furthermore, beyond the form, spatial and functional features, it presents their exterior distinctiveness as an innovative element. The methodology used in the study includes archival research, image documentation, spatial, functional and exterior distinctiveness analysis of housing typologies and exploration of housing form features in different political periods.

The study identifies urban formal housing typologies in Tirana detached houses, apartments, mass housing, social housing, gated communities, informal detached houses and housing with in/formal additions.

This definitional approach can be used to define housing typologies for cities featured by heterogeneous urban context.

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.

The COVID-19 global health crisis is undeniably a global housing crisis. Our study focuses on quality of life in urban mid- and high-rise apartment housing, the fastest growing housing types in many cities around the world. This housing typology presents unique challenges relating to connection to nature, daylight and fresh air.

This multi-disciplinary literature review analyzes more than 100 published papers from peer-reviewed sources from environmental psychology, building science and architecture relevant to quality of life in high-rise housing, as well as more than 40 recent newspaper and magazine articles about the possible impacts of COVID-19 on housing. We identify synergies between passive design strategies and health-promoting architecture or “restorative environmental design” principles.

Post-pandemic, health-promoting apartment housing design must prioritize (1) window placement and views that support stress recovery and restoration; (2) lighting levels based on spaces that can satisfy multiple uses and users; (3) bedrooms designed for restful sleep that contribute to circadian regulation; (4) living rooms with better indoor air quality, with a focus on natural ventilation; (5) access to nature, through the purposeful design of balconies and (6) unit sizes and layouts that enable physical distancing and prevent crowding.

We identify new social and environmental design priorities in the form of evidence-based design principles to inform and promote healthy and restorative living environments for residents in apartment housing.

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.

This study aims to explore the spatial externalities of apartment vacancy rates on housing rent by considering multiple vacancy durations.

This research uses smart meter data to measure unobservable vacant houses. This study made a significant contribution by applying building-level smart meter data to housing market analysis. It examined whether vacancy duration significantly affected apartment rent and whether the relationship between apartment rent and vacancy rate differed depending on the level of housing rent.

The primary finding indicates that there is a significant negative correlation between apartment rent and vacancy duration. Considering the spatial externalities of apartment vacancy rates, the apartment vacancy rates of surrounding buildings did not show any statistical significance. Moreover, quantile regression results indicate that although the bottom 10% of apartment rent levels showed a negative correlation with all vacancy durations, the top 10% showed no statistical significance related to vacancies.

This study measures the extent of spatial externalities that can differentiate taxation based on housing vacancies.

The findings indicate that landlords have asymmetric information about their buildings compared with the surrounding buildings, and the extent to which price adjusts for long-term vacancies differs depending on the level of apartment rent.

From the consumer side, this paper aims to highlight some of the various characteristics that older renters seek out from their apartment buildings, relative to conventional multifamily residential buildings and, from the operational side, to examine some of the costs involved in daily operation of such buildings.

The Rental Housing Finance Survey provides data that enables scholars to test empirical differences in amenities and costs between senior-oriented communities and other apartment buildings.

Occupancy rates outpace the rate for all other apartment communities. Regarding amenities, senior apartment communities are more likely than other communities to have a fitness center on premises, but less likely to have a swimming pool. Market value for senior properties is usually less than properties marketed toward multi-family property tenants. This difference may be due to a higher pattern of both operating/capital expenses within senior communities. Part of these increases in operating costs is due to a higher propensity to hire professional management companies and a higher fee for managing senior apartment communities.

Literature on seniors living within apartment communities is somewhat sparse, particularly regarding the operational aspects of managing apartment communities. There is a dearth of information on industry success measurements known as operating and capital expenditures. This study triangulates multiple sources of data to investigate differences in cost of senior housing apartment communities, as well as amenity structures.

This study examines the long term effects of macroeconomic fundamentals on apartment price dynamics in major metropolitan areas in Sweden and Germany.

The main approach is panel cointegration analysis that allows to overcome certain data restrictions such as spatial heterogeneity, cross-sectional dependence, and non-stationary, but cointegrated data. The Swedish dataset includes three cities over a period of 23 years, while the German dataset includes seven cities for 29 years. Analysis of apartment price dynamics include population, disposable income, mortgage interest rate, and apartment stock as underlying macroeconomic variables in the model.

The empirical results indicate that apartment prices react more strongly on changes in fundamental factors in major Swedish cities than in German ones despite quite similar development of these macroeconomic variables in the long run in both countries. On one hand, overreactions in apartment price dynamics might be considered as the evidence of the price bubble building in Sweden. On the other hand, these two countries differ in institutional arrangements of the housing markets, and these differences might contribute to the size of apartment price elasticities from changes in fundamentals. These arrangements include various banking sector policies, such as mortgage financing and valuation approaches, as well as different government regulations of the housing market as, for example, rent control.

In distinction to the previous studies carried out on Swedish and German data for single-family houses, this study focuses on the apartment segment of the market and examines apartment price elasticities from a long term perspective. In addition, the results from this study highlight the differences between the two countries at the city level in an integrated long run equilibrium framework.

This paper aims to explore factors influencing apartment price volatility in the two biggest cities in Vietnam, Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.

The study uses the supply and demand approach and provides a literature review of previous studies to develop four main hypotheses using four determinants of apartment price volatility in Vietnam: gross domestic product (GDP), inflation rate, lending interest rate and construction cost. Subsequently, the Vector Error Correction Model (VECM) is used to analyze a monthly data sample of 117.

The research highlights the important role of construction costs in apartment price volatility in the two largest cities. Moreover, there are significant differences in how all four determinants affect apartment price volatility in the two cities. In addition, there is a long-run relationship between the determinants and apartment price volatility in both Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.

Limitations related to data transparency of the real estate industry in Vietnam lead to three main limitations of this paper, including: this paper only collects a sample of 117 valid monthly observations; apartment price volatility is calculated by changes in the apartment price index instead of apartment price standard deviation; and this paper is limited by only four determinants, those being GDP, inflation rate, lending interest rate and construction cost.

The study provides evidence of differences in how the above determinants affect apartment price volatility in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, which helps investors and policymakers to make informed decisions relating to the real estate market in the two biggest cities in Vietnam.

This paper makes several recommendations to policymakers and investors in Vietnam to ensure a stable real estate market, contributing to the stability of the national economy.

This paper provides a new approach using VECM to analyze both long-run and short-run relationships between macroeconomic and sectoral independent variables and apartment price volatility in the two biggest cities in Vietnam.

The primary purpose of this study is to identify whether there is a price premium and consumers’ preferences for higher housing density, and whether there is a relationship between housing densities and sales prices. The second purpose was to identify if there is a non-linear relationship between housing density and prices even though housing density is directly associated with housing prices.

This paper applies hedonic modeling techniques to measure the value of development density of apartments in the metropolitan area of Seoul, South Korea. The regression of the sale price is a function of different types of variables such as density, market, location and other control variables.

For the first question, this paper concludes that the higher densities cause housing prices to decrease in Seoul. The summary of the results presents that housing density, floor area ratio (FAR), building coverage ratio and floor level are all important components affecting housing prices. Generally, consumers tend to buy housing with central heating systems, more parking spaces, smaller portion of rental housing within an apartment and buildings that have more of a mixed-use function. Consumers are also found to pay higher premiums for housing in areas with high population growth and less housing supply. It is conclusive that people are inclined to live in populated areas but do not want more density. For the second question, the results show that generally FAR has quadratic effects, but most housing density variables tend to have a non-linear relationship depending on the different quantile groups.

There is a knowledge gap in the area of estimating development density of apartments. Generally, studies investigating property value impacts of multifamily housing focus on external effects of the multifamily housing on home values to examine whether high density development could result in a decrease in nearby property values. These studies found that there are some positive effects. A study found that high-density housing increases property values of existing single-family homes (Joint Center for Housing Studies, 2011). More specifically, developments that are of a high design quality and superior landscaping increase values of single-family homes as well. Also, those residents who live in these high-density apartments can be good potential buyers for the existing single-family homes. The greater the number of buyers, the greater the housing market becomes. Similarly, according to a report by the Joint Center for Housing Studies (2011) at Harvard University, the presence of multifamily residents correlates with higher home values in “working communities”. Indeed, density can be an important factor determining value of apartments because of its unique characteristics. However, no empirical evidence has been provided in the literature with regard to the value of the development density. This study contributes toward improving this knowledge gap.

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.