Personalization of Private Outdoor Spaces: A Case Study of an Iranian Affordable Housing

Home personalization is a way to remedy the monotonous, standardized design of affordable housing, and to make it more congruent with users’ taste, preferences and life style. Previous research on personalized residential space suggests that private outdoor space, especially front yard, provides an ideal setting for personalization. However, most units of an affordable housing do not possess a front yard and current studies rarely give evidence of personalization in other types of private outdoor space. Therefore, the first research question is how four main types of private outdoor space including front yard, terrace, balcony, and rooftop terrace compare with respect to the extent to which each type facilitates personalization. The second question is how the physical characteristics of an outdoor open space correlate with the higher levels of personalization. One hundred and eighty private outdoor spaces of an affordable housing complex are surveyed for amount and purposes of personalization through expert inspection of trace measures and interview with residents. The data has also gone through correlational analysis. Results show that front yard and terrace are the most personalized spaces with two purposes of territorial defense and regulation of social interaction. In contrast, balcony and rooftop terrace are far less personalized, and mostly with the purpose of improving their practicality. Furthermore, larger amounts of personalization are found to be strongly correlated with adjacency to the entrance and living room, a larger size of space, and its being on the lower levels of a building.