What About Interior Design?

ABSTRACT: Studies of density and congestion have provided insights into both attitudes and behavior. The challenge of using these insights for the design of individual buildings and larger community projects has been limited primarily to hospitals, prisons, college dorms, and settings for the elderly. Based on Hong Kong and earlier U.S. experiences, this article discusses how the interior design of small dwelling units can contribute to the policy goal of providing decent homes in suitable living environments.

KEY WORDS: Density, Crowding, Interior Design, Hong Kong

The U.S. Congress did not define the terms “decent” and “suitable” when it approved the Housing Act of 1949, calling for a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family. This helps explain why Minneapolis antidevelopment activists in the early 1970s could contrive their own definitions to falsely charge that Cedar-Riverside, the first of the country’s proposed New Towns-In Town, would create an antifamily, high-density, unsuitable environment. According to James Bailey’s 1974 article in the AIA Journal, the opponents to Cedar-Riverside claimed that “Associated with [the project’s proposed] density are well-documented adverse effects on the physiological-social behavior of residents, including increased crime, loss of sense of community and neighborhood, sense of personal anomic and retarded child development.”¹ None of the usual public health–related building code standards were referenced. Instead, the focus was on how the built environment created an unsuitable social life for the potential residents.

One can cherry-pick the research literature to provide occasional support for this assertion, but most experts would probably agree with the project’s architects (in a personal communication with the author) that the opponents’lawsuit against “Cedar-Riverside was filed with incomplete, undocumented, and personal assertions by people who were opposed to any redevelopment in a highly dense neighborhood.”²

Evidently both the opponents and proponents of Cedar-Riverside felt that the social science research on densities was on their side. Even if it could be shown that high densities in some developments were associated with the negatives claimed by the opponents, this does not mean that design changes would not be able to mitigate the effects. However, these architectural changes themselves presumably would be based on social science research on alternative designs for high-density neighborhoods, their buildings, and the apartments in these buildings. The burden of proof would lie with the social sciences. But what do we know about the social effects of alternative designs for high-density residential environments? And what use do architects make of this research?

One of the Cedar-Riverside opponents’ sympathizers wrote me this summer that “There is a fair amount of research supporting the proposition that super high density [whatever that might mean] housing breeds social problems, particularly when housing concentrates poverty.” This critic would agree with Tao Ho’s 1975 characterization of Hong Kong’s “people-packers” who are “creating multistoried sardine cans solidly filled with restless, frustrated, discontented people.”³ People-packing continues today, as private developers in Hong Kong are building 60+-story apartment buildings, while government housing can go to 41 stories. Yet there is no convincing evidence that these residential environments have become behavioral sinks that are neither decent nor suitable.

The Cedar-Riverside plan called for a mixture of medium- and “high”-density housing for up to 30,000 residents on approximately 100 of the project’s 340 total acres. The variable densities were not to exceed 125 dwelling units per acre, about the same as planned for New York’s Roosevelt Island’s 147 acres in another New Town-In Town project. Cedar-Riverside’s population densities would come to approximately 88 people per acre (based on the project’s proposed total of 340 acres).

As a square mile has 640 acres, one can’t easily compare Cedar-Riverside’s fractured mile with other communities. But residents of New York City and of high-density Hong Kong might smile at the Minneapolis numbers. In the year 2000, Manhattan’s 22 square miles housed 69,873 persons per square mile, down from 106,000 in 1910. The Mongkok and Shamsheipo districts in Hong Kong held approximately 400,000 people per square mile, nearly six times Manhattan’s numbers. There is one Hong Kong per acre comparison with Cedar-Riverside: in the 1960s the area near the old Jordan Road Ferry in Kowloon accommodated about 5,000 people per acre.

While some might claim that American vertical villages are only for the newly wed and nearly dead, all kinds of families live in these neighborhoods. Gerda Wekerle references a study that found that middle-class New Yorkers living in “luxury” apartments were “satisfied with their housing and with center city living in general.”⁴ This condition is not limited to New York City, for Wekerle’s own 1974 study Vertical Village: The Social World of a Highrise Complex found similarly positive attitudes among the residents of Chicago’s Sandburg Village. Elizabeth Mackintosh’s 1982 dissertation The Meaning and Effects of Highrise Living for the Middle-Income Family: A Study of Three Highrise Sites in New York City sensed a trend to counter the prevailing opinion that all family high-rise living is bad and should be prevented.⁵ Obviously the opponents of Cedar-Riverside held a different view. Old antidensity biases die hard.

Residents do survive and even prosper in high-rise high-density housing, but a sizeable minority of Americans harbor the antidevelopment biases of the Cedar-Riverside opponents. Anti-high-rise apartment buildings are part of our cultural history. For example, Elizabeth Wood wrote in 1961 that “the basic evil of high-rise apartments for families is the distance between the mother and her children when they are playing outside the dwelling.”⁶ More recently, a 1997 national housing survey found a 40 percent minority of American adults rated “Traditional Apartment Buildings with 10 or more units” as unacceptable. Eleven percent rated these units as ideal, and another 33 percent found them “acceptable with reservations.”⁷

The Minneapolis opponents of Cedar-Riverside criticized both medium-density (by New York City and Hong Kong standards) neighborhoods and the assumed misbehavior of the kind of residents who would move to the area. The argument that families with children would especially suffer has some research backing, such as the experiences of several failed high-rise public housing estates. However, the residential populations, not their housing, help to explain these disasters. A high percentage of residents were poor, single-parent minority households with a disproportionately large number of unemployed teenagers. Social and economic programs, different tenant-selection criteria, different management practices, and physical design changes might have helped reduce the problems widely attributed to these populations.

Oscar Newman, author of the influential Defensible Space, is known for his design solutions for problem-plagued housing estates. However, he made it clear that the underlying challenges facing these public housing projects were social and economic, not their physical design. Newman wrote “that the many deficiencies in family structures and life styles, the difference in funds for staffing and accoutrements that make high-rise housing workable for middle-income families make it unworkable for low-income families.” Newman and others have proposed neighborhood and building designs to help mitigate the adverse behavior thought to be made possible by existing designs.

My own studies in Hong Kong during the 1960s complemented other researchers who found that parents even in lower-density low-rise buildings complain that they cannot supervise what they cannot see from their home windows. Studies in England have found similar patterns of dissatisfaction.⁸ Certainly the same complaint could be made by suburban parents living in detached single-family homes on large lots. The complaint is not specific to high-rise buildings. Moreover, while parents complain and often act on their worries, there is no convincing evidence that the worries and related behaviors are any more than irritants rather than contributions to high levels of dysfunctional family, marriage, or individual responses.

High-rise residences, Hong Kong Image: Michael Wolf, Courtesy Robert Koch Gallery

We have had five decades of research on how (or if) the built environment affects communities and their residents, especially families. Some of this research has focussed on how space and density (but not design) within an individual dwelling unit affects its residents. Others have studied densities based on data for larger geographical or spatial units (for example, city blocks). Although reliable findings from both micro and macro studies can be helpful in designing buildings and their neighborhoods in ways to strengthen the social fabric of families and communities, it is still an open question on whether the interior design of housing units can significantly affect the residents. Even if some designs were shown to have positive consequences, it is not known if architects and designers would use the results of social science research in their design work.

To see how architects use social research during the design process, I contacted the AIA, several leaders in the environmental design community, and architects in Hong Kong, and I also posted online requests for information from two environmental design special interest groups. Instead of providing me examples and references, I was asked to share with the design community any examples that I might discover (hence the present article).

During my June 2006 meetings with several leading architects in Hong Kong, I asked how interior design could contribute to residents’ well-being. And I also asked how designers learned about the use of the dwellings they designed, as well as the kinds of families for whom the designs were prepared. All my respondents were extremely talented professionals with large buildings to their credit. However, these experienced architects were mostly concerned with urban design and the individual buildings that held residential apartments. There seems to have been a wall between designers and their ultimate consumers, as architects tended to believe that building managers were responsible for feedback on design issues. More systematic information based on observation studies of how residents use the space within their apartments was either unavailable or thought not important enough to play a central role in the actual design work. Hong Kong architects, however, were clearly committed to designs addressing noise abatement, air circulation, and other important resident-friendly features.

Architectural designs can affect us all, but it would appear that little has changed since Janet Reizenstein’s 1975 finding that 87 percent of a sample of American architects was aware of environment and behavior research but only 20 percent had ever used this research in their own work. According to Clare Cooper Marcus and Wendy Sarkissian, Reizenstein’s “[d]esigners did not know where to find research; findings were frequently reported in jargon-ridden language; the design implications were not immediately obvious; and so on.”⁹

It is still not clear to me how interior designers and architects today use (if they do use) the results of social research on the built environment of individual residential units. One representative of a major American architectural firm wrote me that “we do not specifically use social research in the design of our projects….[Moreover t]he sociological work on housing density is in some cases confusing. For example, its proscriptions against high-density housing has led to the dedensification of public high-rise housing in America, but it has not explained why dense high-rise market-rate housing is so successful, and is increasingly appealing in many American cities.” While this firm does not sponsor its own research, my respondent reported that “Many real estate companies do use market research, which indicates changing preferences for the use of both personal space and common spaces. This work [is] often a key contributor to the design process.” Another architect reported that there is a fair amount of “participatory planning workshops—action research,” a process also encouraged by John Zeisel, a leading expert on the social implications of design.¹⁰ Action research via citizen-participation is not the same as drawing on existing studies specific to the design challenge at hand. There is a paucity of such research.

The German architect Arnold Koerte agrees that social scientists have failed to provide architects with usable information. He wrote back in 1983 that “one of my more frustrating experiences with sociologists is that they are very clever telling you why a housing estate does not work after [sic] it has been built, but they can hardly tell you before how you should go about setting up an estate.”¹¹ Even those who do make recommendations are faced with claims by other experts with contrary suggestions—for example, with regard to room partitions.

In the absence of relevant social research, resident participation in the design process can be helpful in challenging the architects’ preconceptions. This is seen in a 1984 British study reporting how architects were misguided in their understanding of the people who would occupy the residences the architects are designing. According to J. Darke, the architects for six London housing projects had “’generalized, imprecise and stereotypical’ images of traditional nuclear families” that would live in these projects.¹²

Large architectural firms and developers of multistory apartment buildings are providers, not users of the spaces they provide. There is precious little research on how residents actually use the spaces that architects are designing for them. This can be especially troublesome for small apartments. An American panel of public health experts recommended during the 1970 Invitational Conference on Health Research in Housing and Its Environment that this situation be remedied by research on “The variety of ways in which interior and exterior space is used under different circumstances by different groups to find the most efficient ways of utilizing and providing space and evaluation thereof.”¹³ This research could begin with resident responses to different pattern plans (rectangular, straight-rambling, T-shaped, H-shaped, L-shaped, offset-bedroom units, and others) that have been around for decades but apparently not field-tested by the occupants.¹⁴ Nor am I aware of studies on how different-size families cope with the limited space and layout of their mobile homes.

Building research stations and housing authorities in other countries have studied how residents use their dwelling spaces. In the early 1980s, for example, Singapore’s Housing and Development Board created an experiment to test reactions to various design ideas in lower, four-story buildings. (I have not been able to locate the results of this initiative.)¹⁵ The Swedes also have evaluated the use of different experimental flats.¹⁶ Even if these experiments provided useful information applicable to the United States, the adoption of improved designs may be beyond the authority of architects. This is because, as the noted architect Moshe Safadie observed in 1983, the architect has only limited control over “essential decisions.” They are made by developers and government offices. This in turn has driven the “designers to focus primarily on novel forms, external decoration, and applied patterns.” Architects are confined to the embellishment of buildings, especially commercial ones but presumably high-rise apartment structures as well.¹⁷

Research on Housing and Neighborhood Design

Instead of assessing how similar residents respond to different interior spaces, the social science research community has focused more generally on the social and psychological implications of high density and crowding without regard to how space is partitioned. Even in Hong Kong little attention has been given to the design of small dwelling units’ interior space so that the possible adverse effects of congestion or crowding can be minimized. Interior design is an overlooked research topic—at least the research on this design does not appear in the standard social science and design publications.

This micro-level perspective on interior design is not what Hong Kong architects advertise as their accomplishments. For example, the 229-page Hong Kong Institute of Architects directory for 2005 only includes a few pictures of the interiors of the expensive apartment buildings designed by different firms. One sees similar pictures in the expensive, upscale home-fashion magazines one might find in an American doctor’s or dentist’s office.

Since a person’s residence (home) is the physical and social space in which a family functions, one might expect more empirical “explanatory” (rather than descriptive) research on how the design of internal spaces actually affects the users of these spaces. In contrast, there is a growing body of studies on the social use of space in hospitals, prisons, college dormitories, and homes for the elderly and disabled—but not for families differing in their composition and social or cultural characteristics.

Yes, there has been research on the effects that housing in general can have on residents. One of the first widely-disseminated studies was published in 1962 by Dan Wilner’s Johns Hopkins team that followed families moving into public housing (compared with a control group of nonmovers). In their The Housing Environment and Family Life, these public health experts reviewed 40 “selected studies,” 16 of which were done in Europe. The American studies dealt primarily with health and social adjustment. My own Hong Kong studies in the late 1960s found that high within-dwelling unit densities did not have the negative effects often attributed to crowding. Marc Baldassare, in one of the better overviews of residential crowding, suggested that too much of the research to date (as of 1979) focused on “’faddish’ notions of the effects of density, or, worse yet, aimless searches for significant relationships.”¹⁸

Other American studies have used ground rather than dwelling unit densities, and still others have been confined to university laboratory settings involving college students exposed to different, environmentally-controlled conditions over only short periods of time. Of more immediate architectural implications, other researchers have examined the effects that thermal comfort, air quality, luminous environment, and acoustic environment can have on people.

Today a good portion of the design-relevant research appears in public health journals and more so in Environment and Behavior, as well as other outlets provided by the Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA). EDRA’s purpose “is the advancement and dissemination of environmental design research, thereby improving understanding of the interrelationships between people, their built and natural surroundings, and helping to create environments responsive to human needs.”

Elizabeth Coit, an architect and planner, prepared one of the first lessons learned on how to tailor designs to meet families’ needs. Her 1965 Report on Family Living in High Apartment Buildings was sponsored by the Public Housing Administration of the federal Housing and Home Finance Agency. She identified difficulties that families encountered and suggested design solutions. Two decades later Clare Cooper Marcus and Wendy Sarkissian adopted Coit’s general approach in their well-known Housing as if People Mattered: Site Design for Medium-Density Family Housing. This important contribution focused on land use and the design of medium-density buildings, not the interior design of individual apartments.

After Coit’s contribution (but probably not related to it), design professionals and their clients began conducting postoccupancy evaluations (POE) of completed and occupied buildings. A typical POE covers a structure’s physical facilities, especially for commercial buildings, although there have also been evaluations of public housing, housing for the elderly, and housing management. Relatively few of these evaluations are in the public domain, but from what is available on these practices, there is no reason to believe that assessments are made of how differently designed (small) homes affect their occupants.¹⁹ Moreover, evaluations that are limited to overall attitudinal measures of user satisfaction are inadequate substitutes for in-depth studies of how design and space affect individual family members and the family as a unit itself.

The large volume of the density and crowding literature defies a short unbiased summary—but I will try anyway.²⁰ First, there is little if any controversy over the public health implications of high population densities, especially in low-income countries. State-of-the-knowledge summaries of this field have recently reappeared in public health journals. They repeat well-known facts—for example, that inadequate sanitation and unwise personal health practices are incubators for the transfer of contagious diseases. Safe waste disposal, adequate potable water, and appropriate immunizations (not physical design and densities) are the most successful health-saving interventions. Attacking the host or the parasite directly does not require altering the physical environment. This public health focus on the links between infrastructure and health has little to do with the kinds of social critiques that groups such as the opponents to Cedar-Riverside made about alleged unsuitable environments. Instead, their arguments were and are based on the assumed social effects of the built environment.

The public health literature does provide some design guidelines for individual dwelling units—for example, where to place the kitchen and bathroom, if these are provided inside the dwelling unit. As Coit explained, “Dinners and diapers are not compatible.” In developing countries, keeping farm animals close to one’s home adds to a noxious health environment. One United Nations study found that morbidities suffered by residents in Guinea-Bissau (where I also lived for more than three years) were partially a result of the “ownership of pigs” by urban families.²¹ Similar environmental hazards are not common in either the United States or present-day high-density Hong Kong.

Second, turning back to density, the literature has at least two major themes. The first refers to the intraindividual processes that translate crowding (density) into cognitive, emotional, and behavioral problems. Information (or stimulation) overload seems to be the most common psychological process. However, this is a conjectured process, not a proven hypothesis. Moreover, it is unclear how physical design can reduce information overload. Instead, the solution would seem to be to reduce the number of people who are present when tasks and information presumably produce the alleged overload. Of course this reduction can in some cases be done by physically partitioning rooms into separate spaces.

The second theme does have design components, as density is taken to mean crowding and congestion—that is, the simultaneous and competitive demand for scarce resources—for example, the use of the bathroom in the morning, a place on the bus, walking on narrow crowded streets, or fighting rush-hour road traffic.

In contrast to this behavioral focus, much of the crowding literature refers to attitudes, a variation of Edward Hall’s proxemics, the study of humankind’s “perception and use of space.” Many such studies have questionable evidentiary value, for as the University of Michigan’s Robert Marans has reported, there is only a poor correlation between objective and subjective data relating to the use of space.²² Moreover, Eric Sundstrom’s dated 1978 review of research supportive of different hypotheses regarding responses to density and congestion found a lack of consensus among different published results. For example, only 18 of 29 relevant studies supported the hypothesis that “small room size [high spatial density] produces crowding, discomfort, or other negative mood/states.”²³

“Perceived” and actual crowding are different, for families can and do adjust to small places and poor design. The need for this adjustment has declined over time. One national housing survey found that only 5.6 percent of American renters and 1.4 percent of owners reported that crowding was a problem. If crowding is taken to be 1.01 or more persons per room, then crowding has declined from 20.1 percent in 1940 to 4.9 percent in 1990.²⁴ The drop in “severely crowded” units was from 9 percent in 1940 to 2.1 percent in 1990. Some of these statistics refer to individuals, others to households (renters and owners). But the household typically means families and specifically their domestic life. Of course families evolve nondesign solutions to compensate for small houses and inconvenient designs. For example, some researchers have suggested that families use time zoning rather than design-related space zoning to help alleviate intrafamily conflicts over the use of particular rooms. Still, few researchers have examined how design affects families qua families rather than the family’s individual members.

High-rise residences, Hong Kong Image: Michael Wolf, Courtesy Robert Koch Gallery

When I lived in Hong Kong during the 1960s, I was energized by the high ground densities and street crowding that seemed to upset others. But the then-colony’s high-density, mixed land use (according to a transportation study by the American firm Wilbur Smith) reduced peak-hour traffic. People throughout a day’s 24 hours made short shopping, work, and home trips within a fairly small physical space. One would think that today’s Hong Kong’s physical transformation with eye-catching (shock and awe) high-rise apartment buildings (some arrayed in built canyons), a world-class transportation system, a shift from manufacturing to a white-collar service economy, less mixed land use, and several million more residents—that all of these changes would create unbearable congestion. However, my visits to various neighborhoods on the island and in Kowloon (including upper Nathan Road in Mongkok, where my 1960s office was) made me wonder where all the people had gone. Somehow the combination of land use and transportation planning deprived me of the energy spurt that crowded Hong Kong had given me four decades earlier. My apparent loss, of course, has been a quality-of-life gain for current residents.

These gains in Hong Kong owe much to land-use and related transportation planning that gave a new physical shape to the larger social environment. But, again, what about the individual dwelling units where families and their individual members spend most of their time?

Hong Kong densities and crowding have decreased over time. Even without regard to apartment design, there has been an increase in the amount of space per person as fertility rates and family size have declined. Second, the square footage of apartments has been increasing over the years. And third, although I do not have the current territory-wide estimates of apartments housing two or more unrelated families (a situation also common until fairly recently in the United States, where urban reformers railed against the “lodger evil”), this sharing has probably become much less common. In 1967, 39 percent of urban adults in urban Hong Kong reported they shared their dwelling with nonkinspeople. A 2000 survey of public housing units found less than 4 percent of the units had the same sharing arrangements. (Government regulations typically prohibit such arrangements. This particular report’s classification is not adequately explained.) The decline in sharing is important, for sharing arrangements were found in my studies (and later replicated by Riaz Hassan in Singapore²⁵) to have negative consequences for the sharing families.

Hong Kong residents utilize scarce space. Image: Michael Wolf, Courtesy Robert Koch Gallery

Competition for limited resources (crowding or congestion) was a likely source of strain experienced by some members of these families. But of course, families differ over time in the number and ages of their members. A 1957 report of the International Union of Family Organizations claimed that “housing overcrowding is essentially a family problem and more especially a problem for large families.”²⁶ European housing stocks at the time had a “manifest insufficiency of dwellings suitable for large families.” There were “relatively too many ‘average’ and not enough large-capacity dwellings.” This imbalance can be addressed by constructing larger residential units or by reducing the size of families. Hong Kong has been doing both.

Of course a dwelling unit and an apartment building define artificial boundaries that need not and can not delimit how families live and the spaces they use. Supplementary spaces are provided off-site or within an apartment building itself (e.g., a party room). In Hong Kong during the 1960s there were limited neighborhood resources that would allow families to export some of their activities outside the home. Play and recreation areas for different-age children were minimal at best, and the same held for places where children could do their homework.

Some of the changes in the use of space and resources had nothing to do with design, but for others the design of the housing estate (its recreation areas) and individual buildings (more and faster elevators, the placement of dumpsters, the size and design of the building’s entrance area, the design of stairwells to minimize uncontrolled space) was important. But, again, other than the placement of kitchens and bathrooms, what if any role did the layout of rooms and functions have for the lives of individuals and their families? How do people use their home environments, and what changes would have the most positive (or negative) effects? Is it possible to identify and then remove design-related noxious influences?

It is surprising that so little is known to answer these questions. The Marcus and Sarkissian handbook is largely silent on this matter, as is the social science, public health, and home economics literature. We have a set of values about the functional specialization of rooms (bedrooms for sleeping and private behavior, bathroom doors with locks), although it is common for some American rooms to serve multiple functions—for example, eat-in kitchens, and the multifunctional family room. Other studies have tracked the declining importance of the vestibule (the front-door hallway), the changing location of farm kitchens, a public-privacy gradient from the front to the back of a residence, and how hallways shape access to specialized spaces within the home. We also are aware of the differences between an efficiency apartment and those with one or more bedrooms, and architectural historians have reminded us that interior designs have changed over time, as Gwendolyn Wright chronicled in her study of Chicago housing trends from 1873 to 1913.²⁷

But there is a difference between awareness of changes and studies on whether these changes have had any appreciable effects on residents. That is, we do not know how small (Hong Kong–size) apartments can be partitioned to mitigate potential conflicts over access to the apartment’s limited facilities. Perhaps design can relieve some intrafamily pressures but that families could function well regardless of their home’s physical organization of space.

Instead of focusing on the internal partitioning of homes, the emphasis might be more appropriately given to the placement of furniture and appliances within individual rooms. Robert Sommer has been a leader in studying how, for example, seating arrangements can encourage or discourage conversation. Other experts have commented on the space that some furniture (e.g., sideboards) can consume and thereby reduce habitable space and traffic patterns (congestion). In our current consumer age, families acquire more and more things that take up more and more internal space. The placement of these things may have more consequences for traffic patterns, congestion, and livable space than does the size and partition of a home’s total space. Sommer has suggested that social scientists can contribute to the optimum placement of things. “Many of the findings of environmental psychology will have more relevance for the management of space than the initial design process.”²⁸

That is, density and congestion can refer to people and their possessions arranged within defined spaces, as well as the behavior or action chains that families perform in their spaces. Amos Rapoport, one of the leading theoreticians in the man-environment field, captured the complexities of viewing the built environment as “a matter of the distance between people and people, people and objects, and objects and objects, as well as the relative permeability of the various separating boundaries—density, as most aspects of urban design must be examined in terms of the relationships among elements.”²⁹

One potential step towards understanding the role of design is to conduct ethnographies before and after a family has redesigned its own living space. Nuala Rooney’s study of 15 families in Hong Kong is a first step in such an inquiry.³⁰ In the publisher’s promotion of Rooney’s At Home with Density, the Director of the Hong Kong Design Centre claims that Rooney proves “that good ‘design’ is the result of common sense, careful thinking, and a natural response to conditions of life.” This book is also said to develop “an understanding of the way non-designers conceive of interior space” and thereby “challenge Western assumptions of space within the domestic sphere.”(In contrast, Gary Evans in a 2000 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, as well as others, have rejected the importance that some attach to culture.³¹)

Hong Kong residents utilize scarce space. Image: Michael Wolf, Courtesy Robert Koch Gallery

Rooney’s 15 Chinese families living in “old Style” high-density Housing Authority estates “had to cope not only with the problem of too many people living in a very small space but also the poor spatial layout, inadequate provisions of electrics (sic) and strict rules…relating to fixtures and fittings within the flat.” In the preface to his study, Rooney reports he “wanted to know…what role—if any—did interior design play in the lives of the residents.” The pictures of how families arranged their small spaces are worth the price of the book itself.³²

As interesting as his study is, Rooney was unable to obtain before-and-after evidence for the standard measures that other researchers have used to estimate the adverse effects of crowding (high density). These consequences might be interpersonal conflict among family members, high levels of emotional strain, or variations of information overload (at least for children attempting to study). Still, few would doubt that the redesigns certainly look better. As Rooney noted, “Every interior design magazine features a ‘Before’ and ‘After’ story. Typically, the redesigned home is virtually unrecognized from the original,” a transformation found both in Hong Kong and the United States.³³

Hong Kong residents utilize scarce space. Image: Michael Wolf, Courtesy Robert Koch Gallery

Hong Kong residents utilize scarce space.
Image: Michael Wolf, Courtesy Robert Koch Gallery

Those of us who have lived in many different homes (in my case, 26 and counting) or have observed how our friends and relatives use their domestic spaces should be aware that interior design can matter—for example, open kitchens, family rooms, the location of guest bathrooms, or the preferred entrance to the home. (The most used entrance to my childhood home was through the kitchen door off of the garage. Guests and family members turned this functionally-specific space into an all-purpose room.) However, our American experiences are often with larger homes than those found in Hong Kong, other high-density communities, or efficiency and one-bedroom apartments in vertical villages.

Some years ago there was talk of a “Kleenex®” home. Once a dwelling unit had served its purpose, it would be physically discarded and replaced by another, differently-designed unit in the same space as the discarded one. Of course, instead of destroying and replacing, we simply move (or “remove,” the term used elsewhere). Mobility allows for adjustment to changes in the stage of a family’s life cycle, as implied in the empty-nest home. As children leave home, not just their bedrooms become superfluous (surplus), but the whole interpersonal dynamics among the remaining family members change. Life-cycle changes also mean in Hong Kong and elsewhere that both densities and crowding become potentially less stressful. That is, the “need” for design and space changes over the course of a family’s life cycle. In Hong Kong, this is leading government architects to adopt universal design principles that facilitate aging in place, a looming trend for this ex-colony.

Universal design based on ergonomic studies and anthropomorphic standards has little if anything to do with the total space in a dwelling unit, how that space is partitioned in rooms, and how the functions associated with different rooms change. Research-based designs to reduce in-the-home accidents (e.g., eliminating high out-of-reach pullout kitchen drawers) also have little to do with total space and its partitioning. There is minimal other social research to help architects to design the internal spaces of a small apartment or house. And even if there were relevant studies, there seems to be only weak links that would communicate the results of this research to the designers who could benefit from them.

This absence of relevant social research has not prevented advocates of different public policies from playing amateur social scientists. The Cedar-Riverside opponents cherry-picked the biases of the time in attacking what they the opponents claimed would be an unsuitable living environment. Little has been said about the internal design of different-sized apartments within this larger neighborhood context. While we may have over the years acquired a better appreciation of suitable and unsuitable living environments, the definition of a decent home is still an open question.

After graduating from Harvard’s China Area Program and earning his PhD in sociology from Columbia University in 1962, Mitchell joined University of California-Berkeley’s Survey Research Center. While on loan from Berkeley to the Chinese University of Hong Kong to establish a research center, the author was appointed director of the government-funded Hong Kong Urban Family Life Survey, a project that included research on how densities affected parents, children, and larger kinship networks. After four years of living, research, and consulting throughout East Asia, the author joined Florida State University’s Department of Urban and Regional Planning. In addition to authoring a number of housing-related publications, Mitchell was appointed the American member of a United Nations committee on the social programming of housing in the developing world. He also was appointed by Governor Reubin Askew to serve for several years as Director of the Florida Task Force on Housing and Community Development. This was followed by responsibility for the joint governor-legislative task force on Marriage and the Family Unit. During this time, the author was also retained by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) for consulting in Jordan on designs for resettlement of the Jordan River Valley. In late 1979, the author became a USAID Foreign Service Officer, with long-term postings in Egypt, Guinea-Bissau, and Yemen. He currently lives in Brookline, Mass. The present article benefitted from recent interviews Mitchell conducted with Hong Kong architects and housing experts, from both the private and public sectors.

1. Reported by James Bailey in the December 1974 issue of the AIA Journal (American Institute of Architects).
2. For a history of this project, see Judith A. Martin, Recycling the Central City: The Development of a New Town-in Town (University of Minnesota’s Center for Urban and Regional Affairs, 1978). Randy Stoecker’s study focuses on the opponents to the development. See his Defending Community: The Struggle for Alternative Redevelopment in Cedar-Riverside (Temple University Press, 1994).
3. Tao Ho, “Design Criteria for Human High-Density Housing,” Ekistics (235, June 1975), p. 377.
4. From Gerda R. Wekerle, Vertical Village: The Social World of a Highrise Complex (PhD dissertation, Northwestern University, 1974), p. 4.
5. Elizabeth Ann Mackintosh, The Meaning and Effects of Highrise Living for the Middle-Income Family: A Study of Three Highrise Sites in New York City (PhD dissertation, City University of New York, 1982), pp. 328, 330.
6. My emphasis. Quoted by Marvin Lipman, “Social Effects of the Housing Environment,” Canadian Conference on Housing (Background Paper No. 4, September 1968), p. 6.
7. Patrick A. Simmons, ed., Housing Statistics of the United States (Fourth Edition, 2001, Bernan, n.d.), p. 65.
8. Joan Ash, “The Rise and Fall of High-Rise Housing in England,” in Clare Ungerson and Valerie Karn (eds.), The Consumer Experience of Housing: Cross National Perspectives (Gower, c. 1980), pp. 105–07.
9. Referenced in Clare Cooper Marcus and Wendy Sarkissian, Housing As If People Mattered, Site Design Guidelines for Medium-Density Family Housing (University of California Press, 1986), p. 5.
10. See his Inquiry by Design (Norton, 2006).
11. Arnold Koerte, “Confinement Versus Liberation—A Cross-Cultural Analysis on High-Rise, High-Density Living,” in High-rise, high-density living: SPC Convention, 1983: Selected Papers (Singapore Professional Centre, 1984), p. 180.
12. J. Darke, “Architects and User Requirements in Public-sector Housing: 2. The Sources for Architects’ Assumption,” Environment and Planning B (1984, B), as referenced by Joan C. Simon and Gerda R. Wekerle, “Planning with Scarce Resources: The Miniaturization of an Urban Neighborhood,” in Willem Van Vliet et al (eds.), Housing and Neighborhoods: Theoretical and Empirical Contributions (Greenwood, 1987), p. 187.
13. Invitational Conference on Health Research in Housing and Its Environment (1st: 1970: Airlie House (American Public Health Association, 1970), p. 11. This report remains one of the best but obviously overlooked reviews of housing, health, and public policy. The author participated in this conference.
14. Examples of these patterns are found in Deane G. Carter and Keith H. Hinchcliff, Family Housing (Wiley, 1949), p. 51, as well as throughout John Zeisel’s Inquiry by Design.
15. Liu Thai-Ker, “Housing Policies and Life Style,” in High-rise, high-density living: SPC Convention, 1983: selected papers (Singapore Professional Centre, 1984), p. 19.
16. See the chapters in Sven Thiberg (ed.), Housing research and design in Sweden: 22 researchers on housing design (Stockholm: Swedish Council for Building Research, c. 1990).
17. Moshe Safdie, “High-Rise Building as a Microcosm of the City,” in High-rise, high-density living: SPC Convention, 1983: selected papers (Singapore Professional Centre, 1984), p. 38.
18. Mark Baldassare, Residential Crowding in Urban America (University of California Press, 1979), p. 5.
19. For a more recent review of POEs, see Wolfgang F.E. Preiser, “Built Environment Evaluation: Conceptual Basis, Benefits and Uses” in Jack L. Nasar and Wolfgang F.E. Preiser, eds., Directions in Person-Environment Research and Practice (Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, c. 1999), Chapter 4.
20. Literature reviews have become a cottage industry themselves. For one of the latest efforts focussing specifically on crowding, see Dinesh Nagar, Human Reactions to Crowding (Jailer: Printwell Publishers Distributors, 1998). As with other state-of-the-field reviews, he identifies more than the two themes I use here.
21. Human Settlement Interventions Addressing Crowding and Health Issues (Nairobi: United Nations Centre for Human Settlements, 1995), p. 17.
22. Cited by Preiser, op. cit. p. 80. For similar findings, see Arthur H. Patterson and Romedi Passini, “The Evaluation of Physical Settings: To Measure Attitudes, Behavior, or Both?” in Charles C. Lozar (ed.), Methods and Measures, edra 5 (Man-Environment Interactions: Evaluations and Applications, The State of the Art in Environmental Design Research–1974), p. 217. Also for the limitations of measures of satisfaction with one’s dwelling, see Guido Francescato, Sue Weidemann, and James R. Anderson, “Residential Satisfaction: Its Uses and Limitations in Housing Research,” in Willem Van Vliet et al (eds.), Housing and Neighborhoods: Theoretical and Empirical Contributions (Greenwood Press, 1987), p. 48.
23. Eric Sundstrom, “Crowding as a Sequential Process: Review of Research on the Effects of Population Density on Humans,” in Andrew Baum and Yakov M. Epstein (eds.), Human Response to Crowding (Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1978), p. 69.
24. Simmons, op.cit., pp. 276, 280–82.
25. Riaz Hassan, “Social and Psychological Implications of High Density in Hong Kong and Singapore,” Ekistics (June 1975, v. 39), pp. 383–84.
26. International Union of Family Organizations. Housing Commission, Minimum Habitable Surfaces, Increase in Size and Cost of Dwelling in Relation to the Size of the Family (Cologne, 1957), pp. 4–5.
27. Gwendolyn Wright, Moralism and the Model Home: Domestic Architecture and Cultural Conflict in Chicago, 1873–1913 (University of Chicago Press, c. 1980).
28. Robert Sommer, “Looking Back at Personal Space,” in Jon Lang et al (eds.), Designing for Human Behavior: Architecture and the Behavioral Sciences (Stroudsburg, Pa., Dowden, Hutchinson & Ross, 1974), p. 208.
29. Amos Rapoport, “Toward a Redefinition of Density,” in Susan Saegert (ed.), Crowding in Real Environments (Sage Publications, 1976), p. 9.
30. Nuala Rooney, At Home with Density (Hong Kong University Press, c. 2003).
31. See, for example, Barrington Moore’s Privacy: Studies in Social and Cultural History (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe). For how values have led to different residential standards, see the author’s “Cultural and Health Influences on Housing,” Human Ecology (4:4, 1976). Also Earl Morris, Housing, Family, and Society (New York: Wiley, c1978). Gary Evans and his colleagues concluded from their studies and literature review that the unsubstantiated claim that some cultural groups are more tolerant of crowding is a myth. See Gary W. Evans, Stephen J. Lepore, and Karen Mata Allen, “Cross-Cultural Differences in Tolerance for Crowding: Fact or Fiction” in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2000, Vol. 79, No. 2), pp. 209–10.
32. The book comes with a documentary film, A Thousand Pieces of Gold.) Elizabeth Mackintosh provided similar information (without pictures) for residents in three New York City high-density apartment complexes. Mackintosh, op. cit., p. 289.
33. Rooney, op. cit., p. 191.