Life style and housing choice in the city of Bandung, Indonesia

Abstract

The development of planning theory and housing approach in the past has been dominated by modernism. Recently, the modernist approach has been challenged for its "bounded rationality", resource limitation, and "value-free" pretence. The postmodernist approach is an "experiment" that emerges from a disappointment with the modernists "value-free", rational, mechanistic and rigid approach. Without intending to be "postmodernist", this housing research utilises both modern rational scientific method and intuitive appreciation to get insight into housing choice and proposes a "culture-based" planning approach - an approach that appreciates diverse values, styles, or cultures of actors involved in planning activities and aims at a holistic material and spiritual development. The description of urban housing issues in Southeast Asia, including Indonesia, has clarified the recent emphasis on solving physical problems and financial constraints. With the intention to promote a "culture-based" planning approach, this research searches for a housing approach that may be sensitive to value differences rather than simply physical standards. The examination of Indonesian urban housing issues reveals a lack of information on the association between "household type" and housing preferences which is required for this approach. Hence, it utilises a life style theoretical framework to identify differences in housing preferences among urban households in the City of Bandung and (intuitively) appreciate subtle value orientations behind the housing preferences. To assess urban housing choices that derive from household life styles, households are clustered according to their life styles, and their housing choices are examined on the basis of this clustering. The central thesis is that differences in household life style may colour the differences in housing choice, thus developers, planners or policy makers can improve the planning for, and provision of, urban housing by taking into account these associated differences. For practical purposes, the research is designed to identify life style groups through a set of 16 socio-economic-cultural-demographic variables which are, hypothetically, believed to discriminate between different types of life styles. It uses Nonlinear Principal Component Analysis to reduce the 16 variables into 6 components or dimensions before doing cluster analysis. Assuming that the groupings through cluster analysis represent life-style groupings, it is found that life-style groupings and housing preferences are associated. While income segmentation better predicts some (cost-related) housing preferences, life style segmentation better predicts some other housing preferences. However, the predictive power of income segmentation on housing preference is much higher in the life style groups than in the aggregate sample. All of these findings show the potential of life-style identification for urban housing comprehension. Due to the limitation of the sample, this study should be seen as a preliminary or exploratory study of life style grouping and housing choice within an Indonesian metropolitan area. However, the study has been able to identify and describe some characteristics of nine urban life styles and their housing implications. It improves the comprehension of urban housing preference through a life-style perspective. It also explores the possibility of applying this understanding to the process of planning urban housing. More generally, it provides another direction for urban housing study, particularly in the development of "culture-based" planning theory and housing policy.