The Meaning of Home: Spatial Practice and the Process of Home Making in Selangor, Malaysia.

This thesis investigates how multi-ethnic Malaysian households transform standardised contemporary row housing into culturally meaningful homes through spatial adaptations that materialise diverse cultural practices. Following independence from British colonial rule in 1957, Malaysian housing policies acknowledged cultural diversity as a guiding principle. However, standardised development processes prioritise construction efficiency, affordability, and universal design over cultural accommodation, resulting in persistent disconnections between institutional design assumptions and diverse Malaysian cultural practices. The central argument is that post-colonial standardised housing, grounded in inherited Western layouts, forces Malaysian residents to adapt and modify domestic spaces through embodied cultural knowledge, lived experience, intergenerational values, and socio-religious meaning-making. Rather than presenting cultural practices as fixed or essentialised, this research interprets spatial adaptations as everyday tactical responses to housing constraints, revealing how households negotiate and define their homes through cultural capital deployment within regulatory frameworks.

The main research objectives are conceptualising home as a dynamic cultural-spatial process; examining gaps between housing policies and lived practices; analysing how Malay, Chinese, and Indian households adapt uniform layouts through cultural practices; and developing evidence-based design frameworks for professionals. The case study examines fifteen owner-occupied households across terraced and semi-detached housing in the Petaling and Hulu Langat districts of Selangor. To achieve these objectives, the study employs semi-structured interviews, mental mapping exercises, and photographic home tours, grounded in a phenomenological investigation of Malaysian multi-ethnic households.

The findings reveal four emergent spatial typologies (multiplied, transitional, negotiated, and sacred) that appear consistently across ethnic groups yet manifest through culturally distinct tactics shaped by kinship obligations, graduated privacy requirements, informal sociality, and embodied religious knowledge. These adaptations also reveal spatial equity imbalance where upper-middle-class households achieve more comprehensive cultural modifications, while middle-income families compromise between cultural ideals and material constraints. This research contributes adjacency matrices that function as equity-centred design tools, validated through focus groups with eight practising architects who assessed the cultural informativeness and practical applicability. This thesis offers an original contribution to knowledge by developing a culturally responsive spatial framework, providing evidence-based design tools that bridge lived cultural realities and professional architectural practice, resisting market-driven cultural erasure. In doing so, it addresses theoretical, empirical, and practical gaps in contemporary housing development and education.