Assessing housing quality: relationships between apartment quality, design, and post-occupancy evaluation

Abstract

This article discusses a methodology for post-occupancy evaluation (POE) of apartment buildings for the middle class built in Ribeirão Preto, SP, after 2000, aiming at contributing for the establishment of effective feedback tools for this kind of projects. The goal of this POE application was to evaluate the quality of internal and collective spaces of those apartment buildings in an attempt to determine relationships between the user’s behavior and the design produced by different organizations involved in the real estate market. The proposed methodology was based on an extensive literature review on post-occupancy evaluation and design process, as well as on a critical analysis of the production of apartment building in the cities of São Paulo and Ribeirão Preto after 2000. The application of this methodology made it possible to conclude that the architectural design of current apartment buildings has not fulfilled users’ needs. This stresses the need to improve the creativity and the management of the design process, and to develop procedures that include building databases fed by POE and also a more effective participation of architects in this process.