Vol :37 Issue No.1 2012 - Open House International

(roof and facade) in whole or part; public circulation
and fire egress (lobbies, corridors, elevators
and public stairs); and primary mechanical and
supply systems (electricity, heating and air conditioning,
telephone, water supply, drainage, gas,
etc.) up to the point of contact with individual occupant
spaces. Meanwhile, base buildings provide
serviced space for occupancy. Supports in this case
are the residential base high-rise building. Fit-out in
the open building approach refers to the process or
action of installing building infill, or to the physical
products used in making habitable space in a base
high-rise building.
7.7 Community involvement in the design and the
management of the high-rise development
Empowering the residents is essential in order to
give them the responsibility for taking part in
designing the living spaces and managing the
shared social spaces/facilities. Smail (2000) advocates
that society is like a huge central nervous system
in which ‘social neurons’ (i.e. people) interact
with each other via an infinity of interconnecting
and overlapping subsystems. The fundamental
dynamic of the system is power, that is the ability of
a social group or an individual to influence others
in accordance with its/his/her interests. Power
could be conveyed to residents through their representation
in the decision-making processes. Jacobs
(2007) asserts that creating communities that are
economically, socially, politically, and environmentally
vibrant necessitates planners to design and
build with the people and to take all of their various
activities, values, and influences into consideration.
Kendall (2011) maintains that those advocating
an open building approach, as mentioned
above, recognize that buildings are not static artifacts.
Rather they need adjustment in some measure
to remain attractive, safe and useful. Kendall
adds that designing and constructing buildings
involve many people, who, when reaching agreements,
make distribution of responsibility a normal
characteristic of the culture of building. Since no
one party makes all decisions when a building is
first constructed nor over the course of time as the
building adjusts to new needs and technical
requirements, we understand the importance of
organizing decision making and construction in
such a way as to reduce excessive dependencies or
entanglements among the parties involved. This
helps in the avoidance of conflict between people
and the parts of the whole they each control, and
improves the chances of balancing common interests
and the more individual interests of those who
inhabit space. The principle tool used by those
working in an open building way is the organization
of the process of designing and building on
environmental levels including urban tissue level,
support level, house allocation level, infill level and
design level. The high-rise building in this case is a
stable spatial and technical "offering", making itself
available to a variety of individual territorial claims,
enabling each occupying power their own decisions
within the constraints of the base architecture.
In developing the proposed public high-rise residential
complexes in the UAE, the process needs to
be 'inverted' where beneficiaries should be identified
first, then the development is to take place. By
doing so, beneficiaries could identify what they like
and dislike about their high-rise project such as the
podium design, the gateways, corridors, activity
nodes and their proposed housing units. Various
participatory methods might be applied such as
brainstorming sessions, public consultation meetings
and focus groups. This will hopefully result in
the creation of a community design handbook,
which serves as the base for the second component
of the plan. Traditionally, the local communities in
the Arab region used to take control over the whole
residential settlements (Celik and Akbar 1991 and
Hakim 2008). So, for the UAE and with the call for
adopting the traditional fareej as an urban pattern
in the future public housing, the residents of a highrise
development should be allowed more control
over the decisions shaping their shared living
spaces. In this case, and to guarantee a continuous
role for the residents in the management of such
spaces, a place allocated as a community hall
within the development should be designated for
the relevant discussions.
8 . CONCLU SION
High-rise residential buildings have been increasingly
developed in many cities all over the world,
especially in the UAE. Unfortunately, the issue of
community-oriented design of this type of housing
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open house international Vol.37 No.1, March 2012 A ‘Fareej-in-the-Sky’: Towards a Community-oriented Design... Khaled Galal Ahmed