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Affordable housing has long been an important planning and design concern in large urban areas and around the peripheries of major cities where population growth has led to an increasing demand for descent housing environments. The issue of affordability has attracted researchers and scholars to explore planning and design determinants, financing mechanisms, cultural and social issues, and construction and building techniques. This interest has been the case for several decades since affordable housing themes have offered a rich research area that involves many paradoxes that keep presenting challenges for planners, architects, and decision makers. Housing costs are increasing in most cities and incomes are not increasing at the same rate. Governments, on the other hand, are unable to provide sufficient housing stock to bridge the gap between demand and supply due to decreasing housing budgets and the lack of investment.

Since 1991 with the advent of globalization and economic liberalisation, basic conceptual and discursive changes are taking place in housing sector in India. The new changes suggest how housing affordability, quality and lifestyles reality is shifting for various segments of the population. Such shift not only reflects structural patterns but also stimulates an ongoing transition process. The paper highlights a twin impetus that continue to shape the ongoing transition: expanding middle class and their wealth - a category with distinctive lifestyles, desires and habits and corresponding ‘market defining’ of affordable housing standards - to articulate function of housing as a conceptualization of social reality in modern India. The paper highlights the contradictions and paradoxes, and the manner in which the concept of affordability, quality and lifestyles are embedded in both discourse and practice in India. The housing ‘dream’ currently being packaged and fed through to the middle class population has an upper middle class bias and is set to alienate those at the lower end of the middle-and low-income population. In the context of growing agreement and inevitability of market provision of ‘affordable housing’, the unbridled ‘market-defining’ of housing quality and lifestyles must be checked.

Culture has always been important for the character of the cities, as have the civic and public institutions that sustain a lifestyle and provide an identity. Substantial evidence of the unique historical, urban civilisation remains within the traditional settlements in the Kathmandu Valley in Nepal, manifested in houses, palaces, temples, rest houses, open spaces, festivals, rituals, customs and cultural institutions. Indigenous knowledge and practices prescribed the arrangement of houses, roads, and urban spaces giving the city a distinctive physical form, character, and a unique oriental nativeness. In a technical sense, these societies did not have written rules for guiding development. In recent decades, the urban culture of the city has been changing with the forces of urbanisation and globalisation and the demand for new buildings and spaces. New residential design is increasingly dominated by distinctive patterns of Western suburban ideal comprising detached or semi-detached homes and high rise tower blocks. This architectural iconoclasm can be construed as a rather crude response to the indigenous culture and built form. The paper attempts to dismantle the current tension between traditional and contemporary ‘culture’ (and hence society) and housing (or built form) in the Kathmandu Valley by engaging in a discussion that cuts across space, time, and meaning of architecture as we know it.

In housing, mass customisation is increasingly seen as a useful innovation for promoting customer satisfaction and thus for contributing to the long-run sustainability of the housing industry. A major stimulus has been the escalation in competition among housing developers in response to the increase in housing consumers' want for individuality in their purchased properties. However, in the absence of confirmatory evidence, the presumed consumers' want for individuality has remained only as a perception until now. In quest for the evidence, an empirical investigation was conducted recently through a questionnaire survey that involved housing consumers, both existing owners and prospective purchasers, in four centres of population across Peninsular Malaysia. This paper presents the findings from the survey. The evidence that was found supports the conclusion that mass customised housing is very much a way forward in Malaysia. The findings show that while buyers' dissatisfaction with current developer-delivered housing has led to a desire or preference towards customised house, buyers' satisfaction with existing situation has not weakened the desire. In the context of Malaysia, this study is important to the development of mass customised housing since it has examined market readiness on the demand side, one of the critical criteria for the concept to be successful in the country.

The nations of Africa, Central and Latin America, and most of Asia are collectively known as the Global South, which includes practically 157 of a total of 184 recognized states in the world according to United Nations reports. Metaphorically, it can be argued that most of the efforts in architectural production, city planning, place making, place management, and urban development are taking place in the Global South and will continue to be so over the next several decades.