dc.description.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. |
en_US |