Recycle ineffective buildings on the main streets to solve the housing crisis in Iraq (Street 60 in the Dora area of the city of Baghdad as a case study)

Abstract

Most of the buildings that overlook public streets in Iraqi cities, including Baghdad, occupy large areas of land as a result of the horizontal expansion of residential stores. These buildings that shift their use from residential to commercial have become unable to meet the contemporary needs of the community that seeks to be those streets and buildings overlooking it encourage people to move around, shop, entertain, and reduce car use. On the other hand, the age of these buildings that were constructed in the seventies and eighties of the last century has become structurally worn out and their designs are old. The structural coverage of 2.5 m is half the distance of the recoil to the upper floors. However, those sidewalks for pedestrians and parking lots lack design, furnishing and agriculture, which made them vulnerable to weather conditions and their weaker relationship with those buildings.   Those legislations also determined the height of the commercial buildings with three floors and determined the setback of the buildings at the time, which resulted in several problems and these buildings did not meet the needs of contemporary society, so the research aims to study this case to change these legislations and make room for either the owners, developers and financiers to interfere with reconsideration using Those buildings to contribute to solving the housing crisis by increasing the population densities. There is an increasing need for the lands on which these dilapidated buildings were constructed, and these areas were far from the center previously, but now they are part of it. Therefore, this problem and its urban dimensions must be addressed to achieve several goals:

- Verify the quality of the buildings use or suitability for mixed use.

- Recycle land use and ineffective buildings as an economic value.

- Providing additional housing units by adjusting the proportional relationship between street widths and building height.

- Increasing the areas of the upper floors allocated for housing through modify the law of reversion and structural coverage of the upper floors.

- Organizing the building's relationship with the pedestrian and sidewalks movement.

- Encourage owners and developers to reuse these buildings.

Key words: urban economy, mixed use, setback, population densities, Building recycling.

DOI: 10.7176/ADS/81-04

Publication date:April 30^th 2020