The New Upper-Middle Class Residential Experience: A Case Study of Apartment Flats in Jordan using the Logics of Burden, Hillier and Hanson

摘要

The city of Amman has embarked on development at every scale and the private housing market has become a strong industry. Although apartment living was not popular to the upper-middle class when it was first introduced during the 1970s, the sharp increase in the price of land together with other socio-economic factors made the flat the only possible choice to a large segment of Amman's population. This research aims to provide an understanding of this phenomenon. It questioned if the relentless invasion of new forms of housing is echoed by shifts in the traditional logic of space. The research concentrated on the architecture of apartment buildings built between 1975-2007, and explored the extent to which the spatial properties of the apartments are generic. This paper explores the logic of Amman's apartments and managed to put the recent residential experience into a spatially typed format by relating to Burden's elements for comprehending design forms, and by using Hillier and Hansons syntactic methods of spatial analysis.