Designing for change: performative and flexible approaches to contemporary housing

Contemporary housing must accommodate demographic volatility, climatic extremes, and evolving household structures. This article develops an integrated framework for “designing for change” that aligns four lenses: flexibility (design method), adaptability (long-term functional capacity), performativity (environmental interaction), and calibrated incompleteness (resident agency) to reposition housing as an open system rather than a finished object. Drawing on Open Building and Open Form theory, we test the framework through comparative case studies that bridge global precedents (e.g., Elemental’s incremental housing; Doshi’s Aranya housing) and Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) applications (e.g., BaityKool, Masdar Eco-Villa, Dubai’s policy reforms, and Saudi developments such as ROSHN Sedra and TAG Villa). Findings indicate that effective GCC housing couples lightweight, modular “hardware” with policy-enabled elasticity and passive-active environmental systems, enabling staged growth, post-occupancy modification, and culturally specific patterns of use. The article argues that flexibility is a sociotechnical and sociocultural imperative requiring regulatory foresight, material innovation, and meaningful participation. It concludes with an agenda for measurement (post-occupancy adaptability metrics), governance (codes that normalize change), and pedagogy (time-based design rehearsal), offering transferable lessons for resilient, inclusive, and climate-responsive housing.

1 Introduction

Housing in the twenty-first century must perform under conditions of relentless movement and change. Hyper-mobility, migration, and economic precarity continually recompose households; climate stress and energy volatility recalibrate what “comfort” means across seasons; cultural hybridity multiplies patterns of living under one roof. Meeting this complexity is not only a question of formal expression but also one of operational capacity over time. With billions projected to need adequate homes within the coming decade, and with the Gulf pursuing ambitious population and home-ownership targets, the region exemplifies the tension between speed of delivery and depth of adaptability. Static, standardized models struggle to keep pace. What is needed is housing that behaves like infrastructure: robust at the core, permissive at the edges, and ready to evolve.

Performativity, incompleteness, openness for changes, flexible configurations, etc., are crucial terms in contemporary spatial design discourses, including housing. Performativity treats the built space as an evolving process rather than a finished object, where spatial, social, and environmental “performances” co-produce the lived home across daily and seasonal rhythms; for instance, operable shading, reprogrammable lighting, and sliding partitions allow a living room to become a majlis or workspace without structural change (Leatherbarrow, 2005; Hensel, 2013; Kolarevic and Malkawi, 2005). Co-production extends authorship to designers, policies, climates, and residents over time. Open Building formalizes this through long-life “supports” (frame/services) and user-modifiable “infills,” while participatory, incremental models such as Elemental’s serviced core plus future additions operationalize it in practice (Habraken, 1998; Aravena and Iacobelli, 2012). Calibrated incompleteness provides a robust yet intentionally unfinished scaffold, such as a code-compliant structure with a kitchen/bath “wet core,” sized foundations, and clear rights-of-way for later rooms, so growth, affordability, and agency can unfold in phases (“half-a-house”) (Palej, 2019; O’Brien and Carrasco, 2021). An architecture of potentiality aligns flexibility (design method), adaptability (long-term capacity), performativity (environmental interaction), and incompleteness (resident agency), allowing dwellings to act as upgradeable platforms rather than static products.

These concepts answer regional pressures: rapid urbanization and ambitious ownership targets in the Gulf demand diversified, flexible typologies (UN-Habitat and AMF, 2021; The World Bank, 2020), while flexibility supports multigenerational change and accessibility as standard (UIA, 2022; Habraken, 1998; Schneider and Till, 2005; Schneider and Till, 2007). In hot-arid contexts, performative envelopes and modular kits (e.g., BaityKool; Masdar Eco-Villa) couple climate responsiveness with spatial adaptability; incremental and site-and-services models buffer economic precarity (Elemental; Doshi/Aranya); and reversible interiors accommodate cultural hybridity, including transformable housing arrangements, with digital configurators and policy scaffolds scaling participation in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi programs (Dubai’s Home First initiatives (2024–2025) and Saudi Vision 2030 housing).

This article advances the concept of a paired lens—flexibility and performativity—as the foundation for such evolution. Performativity treats architecture as a live ecology of behaviors, climates, and rituals, where space is co-produced by use and time rather than fixed at handover. Flexibility names the strategic means that make this co-production feasible: modular systems, incremental growth, reversible assemblies, and regulatory pathways that legitimize change. Building on Open Building and Open Form, we clarify four working dimensions that structure the inquiry: flexibility (design method), adaptability (long-term functional capacity), performativity (environmental interaction), and calibrated incompleteness (resident agency). Together, these dimensions describe an “architecture of potentiality,” shifting the architect’s role from author of finished form to steward of temporal possibilities.

Three questions organize the study. First, what do global precedents, such as Alejandro Aravena’s participatory incremental housing and Balkrishna Doshi’s expandable typologies, teach about user control and flexibility, and which lessons are transferable to the Gulf? Second, how can these insights be operationalized amid the GCC’s multigenerational households, extreme hot-arid climates, and policy-led delivery models? Third, which combinations of performative and flexible strategies deliver resilience, inclusivity, and upgrade-ready adaptability without structural overhaul?

The contribution is twofold: a clear framework for designing housing as dynamic infrastructure, and evidence that flexibility is a socio-technical and institutional project as much as a spatial one. By centering time, how homes adapt, when change is allowed, and who is empowered to make it, the article outlines a pragmatic path toward sustainable, inclusive, and context-responsive housing in extreme climates.

2 Methodology and article structure

Methodologically, the study uses a qualitative, comparative case-study design. A structured literature review (2000–2025) synthesizes theories of flexible/adaptable housing, performance-oriented design, Open Building/Open Form, and strategic incompleteness. We derive a common analytic matrix with four dimensions: (1) flexibility (modularity, staged growth, service-core strategies); (2) adaptability (reconfigurability across the dwelling life cycle); (3) performativity (passive/active environmental systems, seasonal and daily “re-timing”); (4) incompleteness/agency (resident participation, rights, and mechanisms for post-occupancy change). We apply this matrix to paired sets of cases: international precedents (Elemental; Doshi) and GCC exemplars (BaityKool, Masdar Eco-Villa, Dubai’s “Home First,” ROSHN Sedra, TAG Villa). Cross-case synthesis surfaces design principles and policy levers specific to hot-arid, culturally layered contexts.

Structure: Section 2 formalizes the theoretical framework and clarifies the four lenses. Section 3 presents and compares the global and GCC cases using the analytic matrix. Section 4 discusses limitations (data coverage and generalizability), trade-offs (privacy, order, and growth), and policy/pedagogical implications. Section 5 concludes with a forward agenda for metrics, post-occupancy, and codes.

A qualitative comparative case-study design fits the research questions because they ask how and which combinations of flexible/performative strategies travel from global precedents to GCC housing, and how they can be operationalized within specific cultural, climatic, and policy regimes. That explanatory focus—mechanisms in context—requires rich, cross-case patterning rather than single-case depth or large generalization.

The study, therefore, derives a common analytic matrix (flexibility, adaptability, performativity, and incompleteness/agency) and applies it to paired global and GCC cases, enabling literal/theoretical replication and cross-case synthesis of socio-technical design principles and policy levers for hot-arid, culturally layered settings. Surveys or econometric models could estimate prevalence but would miss design–policy mechanisms, while experiments may be impractical and ethically fraught at an urban scale. Comparative cases, by contrast, allow us to trace how structure–services–regulation couple to resident action over time, directly answering the three questions on transferability, operationalization, and effective strategy bundles.

3 Literature review and theoretical framework

This section is based on a specific analysis of literature studies about flexible housing design, adaptable buildings, and performative architecture. The research draws from peer-reviewed articles published in journals between 2000 and 2025 that focus on non-Western contexts and demonstrate citation impact or theoretical depth. The review organized its content through four main thematic sections that examined: (1) mechanical vs. strategic flexibility; (2) adaptability through Open Building principles; (3) performative design approaches; (4) user activity through incomplete designs. The research aimed to develop a unified theoretical structure that connects worldwide discussions to the specific housing needs of the Gulf region.

The review draws on Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar, ProQuest, regional repositories, and policy/IGO portals (UN-Habitat, World Bank, GCC municipal sites). Inclusion criteria comprised 2000–2025 publications that are peer-reviewed or official policy documents, pertain to GCC/hot-arid contexts, and provide empirical/post-occupancy evidence or design documentation in English or Arabic; exclusions encompassed undocumented prototypes, purely technological “green-tech” reports lacking spatial flexibility, cases of pure mechanical superficial form of spatial flexibility, and opinion pieces. The search strategy combined Boolean and phrase queries, such as “flexible/adaptable housing,” “Open Building/Open Form,” “performative architecture,” “incremental housing/site-and-services,” “modular,” “participatory,” and GCC/UAE/Saudi terms; with truncation, forward/backward citation, and staged title/abstract screening. The review is structured and systematic with a comparative, narrative synthesis manifested in Table 1. Table 2 summarizes the key terminologies that the article will examine in the following parts.

Table 1

Table 1. Summary of reviewed studies.

Table 2

Table 2. Key terms roadmap.

3.1 Theories of flexibility

Early literature emphasized “mechanical flexibility” (rearranging partitions and modules), whereas “strategic flexibility” embeds adaptability into the design logic itself and anticipates social, cultural, and temporal transformations (Schneider and Till, 2005; Stollmann et al., 2025). Schneider and Till’s (2005) classification clarifies the terrain: adaptability accommodates shifts in social use; flexibility enables physical change. This framework supports the assessment of projects that must serve diverse family structures, migrant groups, and economic fluctuations typical of Gulf regions.

Open Building remains the foundation for adaptability, advocating a resilient core with replaceable interior elements (Habraken, 1998). Adaptability can act as a dual economic–environmental strategy that mitigates obsolescence while enabling transformation over time. In the Gulf, where rigid villa typologies persist, adaptability points to incremental growth and multigenerational living aligned with regional social structures.

Crucially, adaptability must be embedded in the dwelling’s morphology, not appended through furniture or temporary devices (Živković J. et al., 2021). Operational strategies include open-plan configurations, mobile partitions, multifunctional rooms, and service-core logics that permit spatial independence and reconfiguration across the life cycle. Together, these principles translate flexible housing from theory to practice, positioning it as an architecture capable of evolving with its users while sustaining environmental and social resilience (Schneider and Till, 2005; Schneider and Till, 2007; Živković M. et al., 2021).

3.2 Learning from ephemeral practices

Lightweight architectural design, reframed through the logics of agility, reversibility, and flexibility, can be traced through the subcategories of architectural practices, mostly ephemeral practices: exhibiting, installing, staging, etc.

Ephemeral practices teach architecture to work with lightweight, reversible assemblies, dry connections, track-and-rig infrastructures, and rapid mount/demount cycles. This aligns with Andrea Branzi’s call for reversible, lightweight structures calibrated to a constantly changing world and with Bauman’s account of “liquid modernity,” where forms stabilize only briefly before being remade (Branzi, 2006; Bauman, 2000). Rather than resisting change, the space can instrumentalize “incompleteness” as capacity: a kit-of-parts that anticipates iteration over time. Under these conditions, the interior becomes performative and responsive to activity, seasonality, and shifting social constellations, while re-centering user agency as a primary design driver.

Operationally, such agility is modest and material: track-based partitions that slide to re-time space across the day; furniture-as-divider systems that define zones without hard boundaries; curtains and textiles that create ephemeral, affective thresholds; plug-in service spines that decouple wet areas from layout; lightweight panels and reversible fixings that invite post-occupancy reconfiguration. These techniques echo exhibitionary practice, where space must accommodate change, narrative layering, and diverse audiences, yet they translate cleanly to domestic life. Borrowing from the temporary to strengthen the permanent, the residential becomes not a blank, placeless container but a flexible, lightweight, and agile infrastructure, designed to be rewritten as inhabitants and contexts change (Kassem, 2020).

3.3 Flexibility, open form, and user agency

Schmidt and Austin (2016) frame architectural flexibility as overlapping temporal layers that span from short-term user actions to long-term structural change. At the near end are adjustability (e.g., operable windows and movable partitions enabling immediate shifts), versatility (spaces that host multiple functions without alteration), and convertibility at the layout scale (reconfiguring rooms via sliding walls or furniture). Medium-term layers: scalability, modifiability, and refitability support expansion, minor renovations, and systems upgrades. The long horizon introduces cross-program convertibility (e.g., office-to-housing) and disassemblability, which enables circular economies through the reuse of modular components. Crucially, they argue that flexibility is contextual and time-sensitive, demanding strategic foresight in early design rather than retrofitting after the fact; genuine adaptability must also register technological, behavioral, and economic variables (Schmidt and Austin, 2016).

This shift from static interiors to adaptive environments draws on theories privileging openness, reversibility, and user participation. Open Form, first articulated by Umberto Eco (The Open Work, 1962/1989) and developed by Oskar Hansen and later Valentina Signore, resists closure and deterministic programming. It proposes that space remain deliberately “unfinished”—physically and conceptually—so it can change over time and enable users to become co-authors of spatial meaning (Signore, 2015). In this sense, adaptability exceeds functional flexibility: it choreographs an ongoing negotiation between users and setting, mediated by tools such as movable partitions, transformable furniture, and lightweight materials. These strategies are both instrumental and expressive, allowing interiors to oscillate between privacy and openness, firmness and softness, and to toggle between everyday stability and the theatrical qualities typical of temporary exhibition spaces without forfeiting agency to predetermined layouts (Schmidt and Austin, 2016; Signore, 2015).

3.4 Performative and incomplete designs

Moving further, the literature search reveals that another term, often associated with flexibility and openness, is “performative.” The term is mostly used to discuss beyond surface-level, mechanical flexibility. This is the core of the definition of performative architecture: space is not a finished object but an evolving process that adapts with minimal resistance to unforeseen circumstances (Leatherbarrow, 2005). In this paradigm, interiors are continuously re-authored by users as lifestyles, demographics, and economies shift. Building on this, Signore defines performative in relation to the “unfinished” as an explicit design tactic; keeping form open to enable future growth and everyday improvisation, thus keeping the space performative (Signore, 2015).

Hensel extends the argument through performance-oriented architecture, positioning buildings as responsive environments shaped by energy flows, material behavior, and social dynamics (Hensel, 2013). Translated to interior practice, this entails acoustic variability, reprogrammable lighting, and modular zoning that re-time space across daily and seasonal rhythms. Such responsiveness is not an add-on; it requires that strategic flexibility be inscribed from the outset. As Kornberger and Clegg contend, strategic design embeds scenario planning—anticipating multiple plausible futures and coding them into the spatial framework, so that spaces can grow, contract, or redefine functions over time (Kornberger and Clegg, 2011).

Within this framework, performativity names the experiential capacity of space to enable user control, while incompleteness becomes a method for resident-led incremental development. Projects that stage “unfinishedness” at handover allow households to complete, adapt, and customize according to changing resources and needs, turning occupation into a participatory, time-based practice rather than a one-off event. Designing spaces to be incomplete by design therefore reinforces both social resilience and spatial agency, reframing the unfinished not as a deficit but as an opportunity (Kassem, 2019). In summary, the performative interior operationalizes time, responsiveness, and user authorship as built-in capacities, ensuring that transformation is designed for, not retrofitted.

The design approach of performativity shifts from fixed architectural forms to focusing on how spaces function, change, and connect people (Kolarevic and Malkawi, 2005). The empirical nature of housing takes center stage in this approach, which examines how lighting elements, threshold areas, and communal spaces enable social customs and household routines to evolve. The design outcome of performativity exceeds flexibility as a design strategy because it produces specific qualitative results. The design of Gulf housing spaces is not only for functional design; it also requires expressing cultural identity while managing privacy boundaries and fostering community interaction.

Table 3 provides a comparative analysis of the synthesis of the literature discussed in the theoretical framework, with references as cited in the article and design implications distilled for practice and policy.

Table 3

Table 3. Comparative analysis—theories, literature, and concepts.

4 Case studies: global and regional applications

4.1 From theories to applications

Flexibility in housing is less a style than a strategy: it treats the dwelling as a process that can grow, be reconfigured, and remain “productively incomplete” so residents can adapt spaces over time to changing needs and resources (Palej, 2019). Open Building frames this adaptability across levels-urban tissue, base building, and infill-so that change can occur without system-wide disruption, improving social and technical resilience (Kendall, 2021). Together, these perspectives argue for separating long-life supports from short-life fit-out, enabling incremental upgrading and participatory modification while preserving core infrastructure (Palej, 2019; Kendall, 2021).

Flexibility is not merely convenient; it is also a risk-management tool for cities facing demographic flux, economic volatility, and environmental shocks (Kendall, 2021). The application of flexibility spans contexts and scales. In Yogyakarta, Indonesia, Frisky and Pramitasari (2021) propose transformation models for Type 36 affordable units: additive, subtractive, positional, and orientational, derived from occupant needs and spatial redundancies, enabling incremental future change while preserving affordability (Frisky and Pramitasari, 2021). In Turkey, Koman and Eren (2010) advance a reinforced-concrete skeletal system for multi-story mass housing that supports variable internal layouts for diverse family structures, integrating dimensional and modular coordination to streamline alteration and reduce waste (Koman and Eren, 2010).

Beyond individual cases, Open Building offers a framework for institutionalizing flexibility. Bonet Miró and Brunelli (2011), working around Solar Decathlon Europe 2012, foreground the participatory and pedagogical dimensions of flexible modular and reversible housing through workshops in which students alternated between user and architect roles (Bonet Miró and Brunelli, 2011). Their prototypes introduced “levels of control” and “domains of decision-making,” challenging the static nature of collective dwellings and allowing future residents to modify or expand homes as needs evolve, echoing Habraken’s critique of mass housing’s tendency toward uniform, functionally obsolete stock (Habraken, 1998). The SDE10 Solar Decathlon 2012 ‘s prototype was used as the “headquarters” of the organization during the Solar Decathlon Europe 2012; however, for this event, various improvements were made in the house. The original objective was to develop an industrialized, lightweight, sustainable, and energy-efficient construction system, taking into consideration the need for easy assembly/disassembly (Sánchez, 2013) (Figure 1). In Figure 1, the Solar Decathlon Europe 2012 envelope assembly sequence demonstrates lightweight, reversible construction that underpins disassembly, phasing, and future refit and is core to strategic flexibility.

Figure 1

Figure 1. Envelope assembly process, Solar Decathlon Europe 2012. Source: https://oa.upm.es/77049/1/SOLAR_DECATHLON_EUROPE_2012.pdf.

In what follows, the two global cases—Aravena and Doshi—are examined.

4.2 Case-selection; methodology and analytic lenses

The study employs a multiple-case evaluation to reexamine the framework across different building approaches. Cases were selected using criteria of adaptability and flexible mechanisms, prototyped reversibility concepts, and/or proposals embedding concepts of expandable layouts and reconfigurable volumes (with traceable documentation). Later, drawing on/from the regional cases, the study extracts key design principles and concepts relevant to the GCC context.

Each case is analyzed through lenses derived from the theoretical framework (see Table 1): spatial/structural flexibility, openness to change, user agency, governance systems, and performative qualities, including modularity, spatial adjustability, and responsiveness to environmental factors. This shall enable cross-case comparison and synthesis.

Inclusion criteria include mostly: (1) demonstrable mechanisms of flexibility/adaptability (e.g., modularity, reversibility, expandable layouts), evidenced by traceable drawings/specs or post-occupancy documentation; (2) cultural-climatic relevance to hot-arid, multigenerational contexts; and (3) an innovation component that operationalizes user agency or policy–design coupling. Exclusion criteria are cases lacking verifiable documentation; purely “green-tech” demonstrations without spatial flexibility; one-off showpieces or renders with weak transferability; and projects where user change is illegal/unsafe. These criteria were applied through a common analytic matrix (spatial/structural flexibility, openness to change, user agency, governance, performativity) to enable cross-case comparison.

To limit selection bias and directly answer the research questions about transferability and operationalization, we paired international precedents (Elemental, Doshi) with GCC exemplars (BaityKool, Masdar Eco-Villa, Dubai “Home First,” ROSHN Sedra, TAG Villa), allowing literal/theoretical replication across contexts while grounding findings in regional policy and culture. This GCC/international mix counters both “home bias” (over-fitting to local norms) and “import bias” (uncritical borrowing), letting the matrix test which strategy bundles actually travel under Gulf climate, codes, and household structures.

4.3 Global precedents: incremental and expandable housing

4.3.1 The incremental “half-house” by Aravena’s Elemental

Alejandro Aravena’s incremental housing demonstrates how incompleteness can be mobilized as a performative, strategic design tool across different contexts. At Quinta Monroy in Iquique, Chile, Elemental delivered partially finished, serviced structures rather than turnkey homes, operationalizing “Open Building principles” under tight subsidy rules (O’Brien and Carrasco, 2021). Ninety-three families, long settled on the central site, were rehoused without forced relocation, preserving social networks. Each two-story unit began at 36-m² with foundations, party walls, stairs, kitchen, bathroom, a wet core, and primary structure sized for horizontal and vertical additions to roughly 70–72 m² as resources allowed. Urbanistically, parallel blocks encircle four courtyards, enabling stepwise densification while maintaining light and ventilation (O’Brien and Carrasco, 2021). Here, performativity operates at two scales: the service core/structure gives residents a feasible path to adapt interiors over time, and the courtyards evolve as social infrastructure (Aravena and Iacobelli, 2012). Public subsidies of $7,500–$10,000 per household focused the initial delivery on a robust core, translating fiscal limits into a durable skeleton plus clear rights-of-way for user completion (O’Brien and Carrasco, 2021).

After the 2010 earthquake and tsunami, Elemental applied the same logic in Constitución, constructing “half-a-house” units that provided kitchens, bathrooms, roofs, and load-bearing walls while deliberately leaving space for resident-led expansion (Mairs, 2015). The model recasts residents as active co-authors of the built environment, unfolding across four phases: Before (urgency and displacement set strategic priorities), During (basic modules deliver immediate shelter and clarity), Unfolding (incremental additions infuse identity and diversity), and After (organic extensions consolidate into neighborhoods and civic space) (Figures 2,3). The figures compare Elemental’s incremental housing (Villa Verde, Quinta Monroy) (Figure 2) and visualize the “half-a-house” scaffold and resident-led completion, providing evidence of calibrated incompleteness in practice. The photographs of Quinta Monroy (Figure 3) document post-occupancy growth and courtyard social life, linking policy scaffolds to everyday co-production. Designing homes incomplete by design enables incremental completion and customization as needs and means change, which is a participatory process that strengthens social resilience and spatial agency (Kassem, 2019).

Figure 2

Figure 2. Left: Villa Verde incremental housing project. 484 units | 2012–2013 | Constitución, Chile. Right: Quinta Monroy incremental housing project. Three units | 2003–2004 | Iquique, Chile ©Elemental 2012. Source: https://www.elementalchile.cl/downloads/quinta-monroy-housing-plans.

Figure 3

Figure 3. Quinta Monroy Housing Project by studio Elemental ^© Tadeuz Jalocha. Source: https://www.elementalchile.cl/works/iquique-violeta-parra-ex-quinta-monroy?slide=5.

Across both cases, incompleteness shifts housing from a one-time delivery to a platform for long-term evolution. By embedding strategic flexibility in structure, services, and urban layout, Elemental aligns immediate habitability with future growth, showing how temporal adaptability can scale from the unit to the city (Aravena and Iacobelli, 2012; Carrasco and O’Brien, 2021; Mairs, 2015).

4.3.2 Doshi’s Aranya Community Housing, India: spaces with expandable cores

Balkrishna V. Doshi’s housing ethos—incremental growth, user-driven customization, and spatial adaptability—finds a mature expression in Aranya, a sites-and-services development conceived to let households build as means and needs evolve (Design Museum, 2025; Re-thinkingthefuture, 2025). Rather than complete units, Vāstu-Shilpā provided serviced plots and expandable cores, translating affordability into a framework for progressive self-construction and long-term adaptation. At the settlement scale, Aranya’s plan comprises roughly 6,500 units and 60,000–65,000 residents across 85–86 ha, integrating income groups along a central spine and six sectors to support durable social stability.

Constructively, the approach delivered a service core: toilet, kitchen facilities, and brick platforms, prefiguring foundations for later rooms. Clustered courts and shared walls reduced costs while orienting for light, ventilation, and climate performance. The modular plots and core-plus-infrastructure template embed adaptability: physical layouts can be reconfigured and expanded over time, while streets and courtyards act as social condensers that gain intensity through the accretive process of extensions (Design Museum, 2025; Re-thinkingthefuture, 2025). Crucially, the policy framework establishes secure tenure and “serviced start” requirements to produce incompleteness by design, channeling inevitable incrementalism into safer, serviced growth rather than informal workaround (Figures 4, 5). The figures show Doshi’s “street as miniature city” drawing; frames, expandable cores, and serviced plots as a sites-and-services logic for incremental adaptation. Figure 5, in particular, shows Aranya’s modular plots, shared walls, and climatic orientation—spatial structure enabling long-term expansion.

Figure 4

Figure 4. Perspective of a street as a miniature, by B.V. Doshi. Drawing ^© VSF Source: https://world-architects.com/en/vsc-vastu-shilpa-consultants-ahmedabad/project/aranya-low-cost-housing.

Figure 5

Figure 5. Bottom left: Aranya Low Cost Housing showing the layout of the community. Photo ^© John Paniker. Bottom right: Aranya Low Cost Housing. Photo ^© VSF Source: https://world-architects.com/en/vsc-vastu-shilpa-consultants-ahmedabad/project/aranya-low-cost-housing.

Aranya builds on Doshi’s earlier life insurance community (LIC) Housing in Ahmedabad (1973), a “growing house” model where residents received a core and infrastructure, then added rooms, enclosed balconies, or expanded vertically, turning each dwelling into a lived record of changing social and economic conditions (Majithiya and Umaraniya, 2023). Across these projects, the site-and-services strategy is the hinge. By providing the urban and infrastructural scaffold first, it cultivates ownership and agency among households, especially lower-income families who must build in stages (Design Museum, 2025; Metalocus, 2023). As an international reference, Aranya demonstrates how strategic flexibility at the design stage, a structure sized for extension, fixed services, and supportive rules, enables resident-led adaptability and community resilience over time (Re-thinkingthefuture, 2025; Design Museum, 2025; ArchDaily, 2022; Architectural Digest, 2020).

Table 4 provides a comparative analysis of main regional examples and cases discussed, synthesizing their key outcomes in relation to the argument of flexible housing, while distilling their relevance to the GCC context.

Table 4

Table 4. Comparative overview of flexible housing strategies (Global and regional case studies).

4.4 Gulf region applications: performative flexibility

The 2022 UIA Global Survey on Affordable and Accessible Housing reinforces these theoretical and pedagogical insights with large-scale empirical evidence. It posits that accessibility must be embedded from the beginning, not added as a retrofit, and links it directly to spatial flexibility (UIA, 2022). In this view, housing cannot be sustainable or inclusive if it lacks the capacity to evolve with human, social, and environmental conditions.

A compelling example comes from Austria, where national standards such as ÖNORM B 1600 and OIB Guideline No. 4 promote reversible design strategies. These regulations require features such as widened doorways, service-ready infrastructures, and reconfigurable layouts, enabling incremental, low-cost adaptations. This systemic foresight supports the article’s broader claim: that true flexibility requires planning not only for present needs but for unknown futures.

The survey also highlights challenges in fast-developing regions such as the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), where rapid urbanization and cultural complexity present both opportunities and constraints for flexible housing design. These findings segue into a regional analysis of experimental housing models in the UAE and Saudi Arabia.

In the GCC, the morphological implications of flexibility are gaining attention. Research is showing how morphological redundancy and user-led adaptations affect housing stock highlights. While such transformations are often informal and unregulated, they reveal an embedded demand for more responsive housing systems. Integrating these grassroots practices into formal design could yield hybrid models that balance regulation with agency.

Long before modern developments, vernacular architecture across the Gulf, including courtyard houses in Qatar, Bahrain, and the UAE, has embodied principles of incremental growth. Traditional courtyard homes are typically organized to support spatial extensions, allowing rooms to be added around a central open space in response to changing family needs (AlShuaibi et al., 2023). These forms not only reflect cultural preferences but also offer an inherently flexible spatial framework that remainshhhhhhhhhh relevant today.

In the context of the GCC, where the rapid pace of urbanization has intensified the demand for affordable housing, flexible housing models offer a promising alternative. As noted in the “Affordable Housing in GCC Countries” report (2021), most national housing programs in the region remain heavily reliant on standardized villa typologies, which often fail to accommodate changing household compositions, generational cohabitation, and evolving lifestyle patterns. The region’s emphasis on homeownership and large plot allocations has led to spatial inefficiencies and limited affordability for lower-income groups (UN-Habitat and AMF, 2021). By contrast, integrating flexibility into housing design through modular growth, internal reconfiguration, and adaptable typologies could allow these homes to evolve incrementally, reducing initial costs while supporting long-term usability. The World Bank (2020) also emphasizes that diversified housing typologies, responsive to both market dynamics and cultural norms, are essential to meeting the region’s housing deficit. In this regard, flexible housing is not only an architectural strategy but a socioeconomic tool, one that aligns affordability with sustainability and cultural relevance.

4.4.1 Cases from the United Arab Emirates

Housing across the Gulf is increasingly conditioned by demographic change, climatic imperatives, and the evolution of multigenerational family structures. Within the UAE, this shifting context has exposed a persistent tension between long-standing, static villa typologies and emergent models that privilege flexibility, adaptability, and open-ended growth. Recent policy instruments and design experiments indicate a gradual but discernible recalibration of the housing paradigm, moving from fixed-form delivery toward frameworks that anticipate transformation over time (Mohamed M. A. et al., 2023).

At the national scale, the UAE’s National Housing Program inaugurates a design flexibility scheme that prioritizes future spatial customization, prefabricated modular components, and layouts calibrated for family growth and environmental variability (Mohamed R. et al., 2023).

In parallel, the 2024–25 “House of the Future” competition, organized by Buildner with the Mohammed bin Rashid Centre and the Sheikh Zayed Housing Programme, explicitly solicited expandable and sustainable Emirati villas. Each of the three winning entries responded to the requirement of flexibility in a creative way:

“House of Courts,” designed by Hamzeh Ahmad Hasan Al-Thweib and Luzia Magdalena Stallmann, proposed a single-family home organized around a central circulation spine and three distinct courtyards, creating a layout designed for flexibility, with multiple spatial configurations supporting multigenerational living. At the neighborhood scale, the design proposes shared infrastructure, walkability, and modular expansion. On the other hand, “Modulor,” designed by Marc Izaguerri Serrano, presented a prototype for evolving homes, where a modular housing system is designed for long-term adaptability within dense urban communities. The project is based on a structural and spatial framework that accommodates incremental growth, allowing households to expand or reconfigure over time without full reconstruction. Ground-level courtyards and shaded setbacks support phased occupation across 1-year, 5-year, and 25-year scenarios. The third-place entry, “FlexiCourts,” designed by Lijiang Shen and Yaoyao Yuanis, suggested a courtyard-based housing prototype designed for dense urban living in the UAE, integrating regional spatial traditions with spatial flexibility through modular room arrangements, dual circulation paths, and a layered sequence of courtyards. The design supports multigenerational living and adaptive use, balancing public and private zones (Architecture Competitions, 2025; House of the Future 2024/25). Figure 6 shows the House of Courts concept proposal, which illustrates courtyard-based flexibility for multigenerational living and cultural fit with adaptable layouts. Figure 7 shows the Modulor proposal, which presents a modular framework for staged growth and reconfiguration, providing platform logic for UAE typologies.

Figure 6

Figure 6. The House of Courts; proposal for the House of the Future competition 2024/25, responding to the requirement of expanding adjustable housing. Source: https://architecturecompetitions.com/houseofthefuture2/.

Figure 7

Figure 7. The modular proposal for the House of Future competition 2024/25, responding to the requirement of expanding adjustable housing. Source: https://architecturecompetitions.com/houseofthefuture2/.

On a more practical level, Dubai’s “Home First” policy operationalizes this shift by reducing bureaucratic friction for household-led expansion at the municipal level. The policy enables 100% second-floor additions and pre-main-villa annexes to support multigenerational arrangements, side units for adult sons within family compounds, and relaxed setback regulations to facilitate adaptation within existing plots (Mohamed M. A. et al., 2023). While these provisions must be managed to mitigate risks of overcrowding and visual disorder, they nonetheless encode performative principles—phased growth, user-driven modification, and architectural scaffolding responsive to life-course dynamics—into the regulatory substrate. In doing so, policy becomes a design instrument that produces “safe incompleteness” rather than relegating change to informal, unserviced practices (Mohamed R. et al., 2023).

Dubai Municipality’s “Home First” policy allows Emirati families to incrementally expand their villas without major bureaucratic barriers (Construction Week Online, 2024; Dubai Media Office, 2024; Dubai Municipality, 2025; EconomyMiddle East, 2025). Key reforms include 100% second-floor expansions, pre-main-villa annexes for multigenerational living, side units for adult sons within family compounds, and relaxed setback regulations for easier modifications. These measures reflect a shift from formal rigidity to domestic fluidity, enabling cultural continuity through architectural adaptability. Although framed within policy, this initiative embodies performative principles: phased growth, user-driven modification, and architectural scaffolding that responds to life’s unfolding.

Sharjah Sustainable City extends the argument at the district scale, coupling a master-planned, eco-focused ethos with modular infrastructure and phased development (Sharjah Sustainable City, 2023). Although the primary emphasis is sustainability, the project’s typologies are expressly poised to accommodate emerging technologies, such as electric-vehicle integration and rooftop agriculture, signaling a forward-looking posture in which technological upgrades and spatial extensions are anticipated rather than resisted (Sharjah Sustainable City, 2023). A similar approach can be detected in the Masdar City Eco-Villa project, where aspects of the scalablity of high-performance villas and aspects of strategic phasing and delivery of construction and delivery respond indirectly to the argument of flexibility. Phasing, in this sense, is not merely a delivery tactic but a temporal design parameter that sustains adaptability over the settlement’s lifecycle.

Within the discourse on participatory and open-ended design, Cristiano Luchetti’s House of the Future offers a concentrated demonstration of how cultural specificity and technological innovation can be productively linked. The scheme employs modular construction and 3D-printed components to support user-defined, incremental growth and is organized around a digital configurator (“Ali”) that enables residents to customize spatial elements from a pre-defined kit-of-parts—an Open Form approach that positions users as co-authors of their domestic environments (Luchetti, 2024, pp. 3–5). The dwelling itself is structured as a flexible envelope with layered zones of privacy and multifunctional areas, including a transformable majlis capable of reprogramming with family needs. Passive design strategies such as solar orientation, modular façade shading, and locally grounded material choices further reinforce performativity across form, use, and lifecycle (Luchetti, 2024, pp. 3–5). Collectively, these features illustrate how adaptability can be embedded simultaneously in spatial organization, technological systems, and cultural practice.

Contemporary research in cities such as Hail documents a typological evolution toward expandable housing that negotiates heritage with modern needs, suggesting that flexibility is becoming a mainstream expectation rather than a niche experiment.

Academic literature corroborates these trajectories, particularly within mega-development agendas, where mixed-use zoning is increasingly integrated with adaptable residential typologies. Such configurations can be reprogrammed for different socio-economic and generational uses over time, thereby stabilizing communities while preserving the capacity for change (Salama and Wiedmann, 2013a). Crucially, these projects indicate that flexibility must be institutionalized across policy, planning, and construction systems if it is to function as more than an aesthetic or rhetorical claim.

On the prototyping level, the BaityKool (Solar Decathlon Middle East 2018, UAE) articulates the technical underpinnings of flexibility in hot-arid contexts. Its system couples prefabricated modules with biomimetic photovoltaic façades, water-based radiant sky cooling, and courtyard microclimate management to address thermal extremes at both the building and micro-urban scales (Aelenei et al., 2020; Ortega-Del Rosario et al., 2023). The modular kit enables rapid assembly and future reconfiguration, while the environmental systems demonstrate that thermal and daylight control is not ancillary but foundational to flexibility under climatic stress (Aelenei et al., 2020; Ortega-Del Rosario et al., 2023). In other words, performative capacity is understood as the ability to modulate energy, light, and comfort conditions, whether spatial adaptability is genuinely usable across seasons and occupancy cycles (Figure 8). Figure 8 shows how the BaityKool prototype couples modular assembly with passive/active systems to provide climate-performative adaptability in hot-arid conditions.

Figure 8

Figure 8. Prototype designed for research and development in a very hot climate ^© Baitykool. Source: https://baitykool.com/BKinTSC-en.html.

Taken together, UAE case studies and regional parallels point to a multi-scalar model of flexible housing in which design, policy, and technology are mutually reinforcing. Programs such as the National Housing Program and “Home First” deploy regulation as a scaffold for incremental change (Mohamed R. et al., 2023), while competitions and prototypes cultivate design languages and construction systems oriented toward extension and reconfiguration (Buildner, 2025; Aelenei et al., 2020; Ortega-Del Rosario et al., 2023).

District-scale planning demonstrates how phased infrastructure and technology-ready typologies can stabilize neighborhoods without foreclosing future transformation (Sharjah Sustainable City, 2023). As these strands converge, the UAE offers an instructive laboratory for housing that is at once culturally grounded, environmentally performative, and structurally prepared for growth, an architecture calibrated to the lived temporality of families and to the climatic and economic realities that shape domestic life (Salama and Wiedmann, 2013b; Mohamed M. A. et al., 2023).

4.4.2 Cases from Saudi Arabia

The Vision 2030 Housing Program Delivery Plan (2021–2025) for Saudi Arabia presents a new approach to housing flexibility, through its programmatic delivery framework, by using financial tools, developer associations, and digital systems to create adaptable housing options that evolve through time (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Vision 2030 Housing Program Delivery Plan). The method acknowledges that large-scale delivery systems must be adaptable because population numbers increase quickly and family living arrangements transform.

In Saudi Arabia, the TAG Villa synthesizes vernacular cues with modularity and movable elements to accommodate multigenerational households, aligning cultural specificity with structural flexibility. These shifts cohere with a national uptick in prefabricated and modular construction consonant with Vision 2030 priorities on efficiency and livability (Al-Dakheel, 2024). Contemporary research in cities such as Hail documents a typological evolution toward expandable housing that negotiates heritage with modern needs, suggesting that flexibility is becoming a mainstream expectation rather than a niche experiment.

The architectural and planning strategy of modularity and phased growth has become more prevalent in Saudi Arabia for large-scale developments. The ROSHN Sedra project in Riyadh prioritizes its design on Najdi architectural elements through villa floor plans that enable both horizontal and vertical growth.

The master plan follows sequential development phases that allow the project to expand, adjust to changing family requirements and urban population densities across its thousands of units (ROSHN, 2025).

The TAG Villa project shows its ability to support multigenerational living through its architectural design, which incorporates modular and movable elements. The villa design incorporates local cultural spatial elements that allow residents to adapt their interior spaces and extend their outdoor areas according to their changing requirements (Al-Dakheel, 2024). The TAG Villa project crystallizes many threads from our discussion—strategic flexibility, performative interiors, and culturally grounded privacy—by translating them into a compact semi-detached villa on a 14 m × 15 m plot. Structurally, it adopts an “open-plan free structural system” with services consolidated to one corner (domino logic), plus standardized coordination across building systems, to lower barriers to reconfiguration (Figures 9, 10). Figure 9 explains the TAG design process (setbacks, courtyard, and ground floor) and shows how privacy codes and cultural patterns structure flexible arrangements. Figure 10 illustrates flexibility/expansion in diagrams, and it clarifies convertibility and “safe incompleteness” within governance bounds.

Figure 9

Figure 9. TAG villa, The design process of the setback, courtyard, and ground floor ^© Ayyıldız et al. (2024).

Figure 10

Figure 10. Diagrams interpreting the flexibility and the potential expansion in the TAG Villa (by authors).

Functionally, convertibility and versatility are designed in rather than retrofitted: sliding partitions re-time the ground floor into two interchangeable zones, and a neutral roof room and multiuse terrace allow the program to migrate across the life cycle. Culturally, the project reactivates inward-looking privacy through courtyard organization, minimized outward openings, reflective glazing, and 2-m balcony parapets, formalizing everyday practices instead of pushing them to the informal. Limits remain: façade personalization is intentionally constrained to protect street coherence, and extendibility (horizontal/vertical) is largely precluded by pre-allocated roof/yard space. Read against Gulf trade-offs (privacy, multigenerational living, and orderly growth), TAG Villa exemplifies “safe incompleteness:” a serviced, adaptable scaffold that supports user agency within clear governance bounds (Ayyıldız et al., 2024).

The Saudi housing sector has experienced fast growth of prefabricated and modular construction techniques that support Vision 2030 objectives for efficient, adaptable, and livable housing solutions. The standard expansion techniques consist of modular design, including convertible floor plans, and structural systems that allow both horizontal and vertical growth from the beginning of construction.

Taken together, these cases underscore that housing flexibility is a multiscalar and multimodal endeavor. Enabling long-term adaptability remains a challenge. However, it seems that the Gulf region is moving toward flexibility through four main factors, which include prefabrication techniques, housing phasing and delivery design, climate-responsive architectural designs, and adaptive regulatory frameworks, that enable adjustments at building and citywide scales. The UAE prototypes (BaityKool) showcase modular systems that deliver high environmental performance. The Saudi projects (ROSHN Sedra and TAG Villa) demonstrate strategic flexibility through their master planning and housing delivery systems. This pattern suggests that Gulf housing models will benefit from a blended strategy: combining the incremental adaptability of global precedents/trends with regional priorities of climate resilience, phased growth, policy enablement, and cultural relevance. Table 5 offers a comparative overview of flexible housing strategies drawn from the GCC cases.

Table 5

Table 5. Comparative overview of flexible housing strategies (GCC case studies).

5 Discussion

Evidence across cases shows that flexibility is not a slogan but a working mechanism. In Quinta Monroy, 93 households received serviced “half-houses” of 36 m² engineered to expand to roughly 70–72 m²; the courtyard block kept ventilation and daylight while allowing stepwise infill. Targeted subsidies (USD 7,500–10,000) financed the robust core, converting limited budgets into clear, buildable rights-of-way. At a larger policy scale, Aranya’s site-and-services framework, approximately 6,500 units for roughly 60–65 k residents on 85–86 ha, paired secure tenure, expandable cores, and climate-oriented plotting to normalize incremental growth. In the GCC, Dubai’s Home First (annexes, side units, and full second-floor expansions) lowers approval friction and operationalizes “safe incompleteness.” At the dwelling scale, TAG Villa demonstrates culturally tuned convertibility on a 14 m × 15 m plot: sliding partitions re-time ground floor use, a neutral roof room extends the life cycle, and 2 m parapets preserve privacy. Climate-performative adaptability is likewise practical: BaityKool’s modular kit couples spatial change with environmental control across seasons. Taken together, the consistent mechanism is layered: long-life supports and service cores (unit), courtyards/blocks (urban), and enabling codes (policy) that unlock resident agency and measurable growth, which are precisely the operationalization, cultural fit, and transferable bundles queried by this study.

5.1 Limitations

Flexible housing encounters economic and ideological headwinds: developers favor standardized, short-horizon delivery; pre-planning for modularity can increase upfront costs; and critics (e.g., Jia Beisi) question whether “adaptability” empowers users or abdicates professional duty. Aesthetic skepticism persists (recall Stirling’s characterization of non-committal architecture). Methodologically, this study analyzes prominent exemplars rather than a full universe of cases, omits many informal adaptations and small-scale experiments, and relies on policy sources for GCC evidence rather than longitudinal post-occupancy data, constraining generalizability. Future work should track multi-year household modifications in Gulf villas, evaluate modular/lightweight prototypes in use, and test how household-level flexibility scales with coherent urban design and regulatory instruments.

5.2 Potentials

Aligned with resilience and sustainability agendas, the upside is significant. In the UAE, modular systems resonate with traditions of incremental family-driven expansion, enabling layered flexibility and structural, spatial, and social responsiveness to shifting household composition, climate, and economic cycles. At the urban scale, flexibility also carries a political charge: following Živković J. et al. (2021), recognizing user diversity and formalizing constructive “informal” practices positions adaptability as a right in social housing. Realizing these potentials requires institutional scaffolding—participatory processes, design guidelines, incentives for modular construction, and community engagement—to mainstream flexible design.

5.3 Negotiating trade-offs: privacy, culture, and growth

In the Gulf, multigenerational living and privacy norms meet rapid expansion. Dubai’s “Home First” reforms enable annexes and second-floor additions, improving fit to family life yet raising risks of overcrowding and visual disruption (Mohamed R. et al., 2023), while Saudi Arabia’s ROSHN Sedra deploys modular villas to accommodate growth while preserving neighborhood order but must continually balance private space with coherent urban structure. Comparative precedents show how important is the role of policy, which has a duty to produce safe incompleteness, secure tenure, and serviced starts, to channel incremental change. A multi-scalar strategy, household to district, combining incremental adaptability, performative modularity, and calibrated regulation, can reconcile privacy and culture with environmental and economic efficiency in Gulf housing (Mohamed M. A. et al., 2023; ROSHN, 2025).

6 Conclusion

Flexible housing is not a stylistic flourish or a niche technique; it is a multi-layer project spanning governance, technology, and culture. The comparative analysis in this article demonstrates that enduring impact emerges when parameters such as openness for growth, seasonal adaptability/adjustability, and incompleteness are deliberately synchronized. Spatial systems must be conceived as upgradable platforms: modular grids, service-core logics, and reversible assemblies that separate long-life structure from short-life fit-out and afford change without demolition.

Institutional systems—planning codes, permitting pathways, delivery models, and incentives—must legitimize calibrated “flexibility” and “unfinishedness” at handover and remove friction for incremental growth, subdivision, or recombination over the dwelling’s life.

Within the GCC, aligning these systems in parallel with policy-enabled elasticity, clear rules for extensions, change-of-use of accessory spaces, and pre-approved catalogs of modules protects neighborhood coherence as households and communities evolve. Such organizational and design arrangements translate flexibility from rhetoric into application.

Embedding time-based design approach and “change rehearsals” in design and contracting proposals shall allow clients and designers to learn to stage evolution, not only deliver completion. Designing for change—methodically, measurably, and with resident agency at the center—reframes housing as resilient infrastructure. For the Gulf, this approach offers a pragmatic path to inclusivity and climate responsiveness: homes that begin robust, invite participation, and remain upgradeable across shifting futures.

A feasible next agenda is threefold. First, measurement: post-occupancy adaptability metrics that track frequency, cost, duration, and reversibility of changes alongside social outcomes (privacy, care, income diversification). Second, governance: codified standards for reversible connections and fast-track permitting for low-risk alterations, protecting neighborhood coherence while enabling agency. Third, pedagogy and procurement: time-based design rehearsals and scenario planning embedded in briefs, contracts, and curricula so that homes are delivered as upgradeable platforms rather than finished objects.

Designing for change—methodically, measurably, and with residents as co-authors—offers a pragmatic path to inclusive, climate-responsive housing in the Gulf and beyond.

Author contributions

AK: Writing – original draft, Writing – review and editing. TE: Writing – original draft, Writing – review and editing. MC: Writing – original draft, Writing – review and editing. WH: Writing – original draft, Writing – review and editing.

Funding

The author(s) declare that financial support was received for the research and/or publication of this article. The financial support was received from Ajman University for the publication of this article.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Generative AI statement

The author(s) declare that Generative AI was used in the creation of this manuscript. The author(s) verify and take full responsibility for the use of generative AI in the preparation of this manuscript. Generative AI was used solely for language refinement, grammar correction, and improving clarity of expression. No AI was used for data generation, analysis, interpretation of findings, or in drafting substantive content or conclusions.

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