مطالب

In Nigeria, crowded housing is one of the housing stresses that bother policy-makers and housing authorities.This study exامینes the crowding levels in seven marital status categories among the occupants of Lagos State Development and Property Corporation’s apartments. The focus is on the capacity of an apartment’s internal spaces to meet the sleeping needs of households in different marital arrangements. A case study of four housing estates was purposively selected among Lagos State Development and Property Corporation’s multifamily categories, with a population of 7,764 apartments. A sample of 7.5% (582) was chosen using stratification and systematic random techniques. A pretested questionnaire instrument was used to collect the relevant demographic data of occupants. The occupants in different marital arrangements were grouped into three: households that harboured one to two occupants; households that harboured three to five occupants; and households that harboured six or more occupants. The result shows that households containing three to five persons were the most dominant in all apartment types while households that contain six or more persons were very few. Generally, the result showed no substantial disparity in the incidence of crowding among households of various marital classifications in different apartment types. The link between “Separated” and “Divorced” was revealed, as both types were not found among respondents living in two-bedroom apartments. The number of occupants in the “just single” and “married” categories were high compared to others. These results are significant for policies regarding occupancy, crowding and design of Lagos State Development and Property Corporation’s apartments.

Identity, a series of traits and characteristics that makes a person or a member of the community come to a kind of “ recognition” about individuals and other communities; The city also, following the example of this criterion gains character and gets independent. Identity in the city, through the creation and association with “public memories” of citizens causes the sense of interest and dependence which leads the inhabitants of the city toward becoming a citizen, which is a more active level of being just inhabitants. Although the identity is the effect of the culture of its citizens, it affects the process of becoming a citizen and can cause the formulation of criteria related to the participation and judging of observers and residents. Urban identity is a reflection of all the local people’s traditions, culture and aspirations grouped together. It reflects their needs, successes, failures and future. Constricted, the city is understood and interpreted through the technical rather than the sensory, yet it is the sensory from which people build their feeling and emotion. Sensuous requirements may coincide or conflict with other demands but cannot be separated from them in designing or judging urban spaces. The static physical setting, activities and meaning constituted three basic elements of urban identity places. Since place identity is a sub-structure of the self-identity of person consisting of broadly conceived cognitions about the world in which the individual lives. These cognitions represent memories, ideas, values, meanings and conceptions of behavior and experience. This study investigates and compares basic elements of urban identity in Zanjan city entrances with using Analytical Hierarchy Process Method and the proposed recommendations for the increase identity.

In recent years, the issue of energy consumption modeling techniques in the building sector has been widely considered by researchers and managers. Researches indicate that energy consumption in residential sector is one of the main parts of the total consumption. Moreover, the urban residence is supposed as a significant consumer of energy in every country and therefore a focus for energy consumption efforts. For over increasing building energy consumption there can be some causes including : climate change, increase in household electricity load, fast-growing household electrical appliances, huge energy consumption of the buildings, and the lack of strict government supervision. Recently the issue of assigning different prices to different time-periods of energy consumption has been taken into consideration for energy prices of consumers’ bills. Therefore, in this paper a model for multi-prices and multi-periods single-type energy consumption in urban residential sector is presented; also an efficient heuristic method is provided for solving the mentioned model.