A STATISTICAL RESEARCH ON THE TYPICAL PATTERNS OF MODERN HOUSING FABRICS, CASE STUDY OF NANJING, CHINA

Abstract

After nearly 20 years of massive social housing construction and another 20 years of housing real estate development, Chinese cities basically solved the citizen’s housing problem in the second decade of the 21st century. As a consequence, the major physical component of contemporary cities is modern housing fabrics, which cover over 30% urban land. It is generally believed this magnitude housing development is dominated by modernism residential building with a standard image of a slab apartment. However, as revealed in this research, the real situation is far more diversified and complicated, with various building types, like villas, slabs, towers, and different spatial arrangements, like parallel, zigzag, enclosure. How to classify these diversified realities and what are the typical patterns of different housing fabrics? To answer these questions, this research collected more than 200 housing fabric samples across the city of Nanjing. The latter is the Capital of Jiangsu Province, and a typical modern mega-city in Yangzi River Delta area. To get the reasonable categories of fabric types, a comprehensive classification system is applied. Different from the too simplified classification based on single parameter, building height, adopted in the national housing standard, this classification system is based on the matrix of various parameters, including building height, arrangement, and a building type. The various parameters and their intricate combinations guarantee the classification to be capable to seize and distinguish the formal features of different fabrics. Spacemate, a charting tool developed by B.M. Pont and et al. in TU Delft, is used to testify the classification. After the classification, the samples are divided into 21 categories. For each category, data samples, like spacing, dimension of building footprint, height, density, land coverage, and et al. are collected and a statistical analysis are conducted. Based on this qualitative sample studies, the typical patterns and their statistical models are built up. In the application part, a bioclimatic performance study of these typical patterns is presented. Due to the typicality and statistical precision, the complicated co-relation between urban fabric and bioclimatic performance could be discovered, efficiently and convincingly.