Housing and Habitability: Gender Findings for Housing Complexes

Abstract

Cities configure habitability whose study does not yet incorporate the gender perspective to base design and construction strategies. A pressing case is the housing complexes and especially those of minimum high-density housing. The objective is to expose the findings of the project called: “Evaluation of urban and architectural conditions and their impact on the habitability of mass-built housing complexes in Mexico. Me?rida, Yucata?n Case 2014-236282”, funded by the National Housing Commission and the National Council for Science and Technology (Conavi-Conacyt). Being a study of habitability and not of gender, the findings underlie the objective of evaluating the product through who lives and explain the differentiated ways in which the house and the urban scale are inhabited based on three urban and architectural elements: physical and cultural functionality, adaptability to the environment and construction safety. The specific objective of this work is to characterize the urban and architectural conditions of housing in high-density urban complexes with priority given to female inhabitants. The hypothesis indicates that the contrast between the qualities of the design and construction of the housing complexes against the life experiences shows a lack of an inclusive vision that allows to differentiate and understand how the social groups inhabit and live the housing of the housing complexes of construction in series, with which to be able to improve the proposals in favor of habitability. The mixed methodology focuses on the management of qualitative variables that allow understanding life experiences in the home, whose statistical frequency in coincidence or dispersion, the importance of the data can be determined by way of discovery and serendipity. It is clear that urban planning, design, and construction decisions have historically been in the hands of mostly male professionals, who created the norms and regulations in urban and housing matters, under a perspective and assumptions of the male group generalizing towards how live the female group.