"when Parallel Lines Meet": Realizing Socially Resilient Public Housing through Reconciling Formal and Informal Practices in the UAE

Socially resilient housing design aims to satisfy the diverse and ongoing changing social needs of the residents. In reaction to the problem of the lack of responsiveness to changing residents' needs, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) public housing has experienced two contending responses: informal and formal. The investigations into the residents' informally constructed extensions revealed some resulting patterns of architectural design morphologies for size, shape, form, and style, utilized construction methods, techniques, and materials. These actions, although they responded to the residents' social needs, were coupled with some functional, constructional, and negative health impacts due to the residents' lack of technical experience. In addition, the formal responses largely failed to solve the inadaptability problem. Reconciling the competing formal and informal practices by building on the advantages and limiting the disadvantages of each has yielded a promising conceptual design approach for socially resilient public housing in the UAE.