Designing a model to evaluate housing privacy

Assessing housing privacy includes individuals’ perception and the relationships created in the living spaces and in their immediate neighborhood. Based on this information and supported by a systematic literature review, this article presents a conceptual model to evaluate housing privacy. It focuses on the built environment, user behavior and human socio-spatial relationships that ensued from this interaction and was based on a multimethod evaluation which included instruments with user participation by using a panel of experts, interviews and questionnaires, and a social and physical evaluation. To define the final model, a pretest was carried out in an exploratory study which was applied on a multiple tower housing building, located in Natal (Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil). The main contributions of the article are disseminating methods related to creating conceptual models within the scope of architecture; compilation of attributes, performance indicators and instruments used to evaluate housingprivacy; proposing a practical guide to evaluate housing that focuses on design process and points out potential and problems; suggest recommendations that improve the architectural product, by increasing its quality.