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’ tastes, preferences, and lifestyles. Previous research on personalized residential space suggests that private outdoor spaces, especially the front yard, provide an ideal setting for personalization. However, most units of affordable housing do not possess a front yard and current studies rarely give evidence of personalization in other types of private outdoor spaces. Therefore, the first research question is how four main types of private outdoor spaces including the 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 were surveyed for amount and purposes of personalization through expert inspection of trace measures and interviews with residents. The data were gone through correlational analysis. Results showed that front yard and terrace were the most personalized spaces with two purposes of territorial defense and regulation of social interaction. In contrast, the balcony and rooftop terrace were far less personalized, and mostly with the purpose of improving their practicality. Furthermore, larger amounts of personalization were 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.