Affordable Honeycomb Housing: For Every Home, a Private and a Shared Garden

Mazlin Ghazali

May 2019 · Mazlin Ghazali

About this ebook

 As cities grow, land becomes scarcer and dearer. In Malaysia, terrace houses in the cities and suburbs are already out of the financial reach of most people. They must make do with high-rise housing, but even these are increasingly expensive. With increasing prosperity, car-ownership spirals, congesting main arteries, dominating neighbourhood streets and discouraging other activities - walking, cycling, children’s outdoor play, and casual social interaction – making low-rise neighbourhoods less vibrant. As for high-rise housing, it has always been associated with social ills. 
Is this trend of homes becoming less affordable and neighbourhoods becoming more sterile inevitable? Are there any design alternatives to terrace houses and high-rise blocks that can make housing socially better and affordable? 
This book offers the optimistic prospect that courtyard homes - with private and shared gardens in front of them – can create an environment is that more community-friendly. That these courtyard neighbourhoods can be created in both low-rise as well as high-rise situations. That these houses and neighbourhoods can be designed in a cost-efficient way so that these courtyard homes can be affordable to as many as possible.
Pie in the sky? Not quite…
Several affordable low-rise projects have already been completed or are in the pipeline. We are also working to commercialize our R&D that extend the ideas first developed for low-rise to various types of high-rise housing projects. 

About the author

Mazlin Ghazali graduated from Welsh School of Architecture with a B.Arch in 1984 and set up Arkitek M. Ghazali in 1993. Since the year 2000, the firm has built up a substantial portfolio of housing projects comprising almost 12,000 units, all of which are in the affordable category and most using system construction methods. In that time, Arkitek M. Ghazali also started R&D work, first in thermal comfort and then in new courtyard based housing layouts, resulting in the concept of “Honeycomb Housing” with patents for key aspects of the work. That R&D work has been successfully commercialized with pioneer projects completed in Johor Bahru, Bernam Jaya, Alor Gajah and Sungai Petani, and several others in the pipeline. 

He co-wrote “Thermal Comfort Honeycomb Housing” in 2006.