Reference

Glossary and abbreviations

The words this book uses, in plain terms, for readers who are not architects.

Places and local words

Atoll: A ring of coral islands and reefs around a lagoon. Malé, Villimalé and Hulhumalé are in Kaafu Atoll.
Greater Malé Region: Malé and the islands tied to it by bridges and ferries, among them Villimalé, Hulhumalé, Hulhulé (the airport) and Thilafushi.
Reclamation: Making new land by pumping sand from the lagoon onto the reef. Hulhumalé was built this way from 1997.
Magu, hingun, goalhi: Dhivehi for a street, a wider road and a narrow lane, as in Majeedhee Magu or Haveeree Hingun.
Joali: A traditional seat of netting strung on a frame, set outside homes and shops for sitting and talking.
Holhuashi: An open-sided shelter where people sit together, often by the beach or the harbour.
Godown: A warehouse. On Malé’s northern edge, godowns and port yards hold the waterfront.

Planning and building

Masterplan: A plan for how a whole area should change: its streets, open spaces, buildings and uses, decided together. Chapter 03 proposes one for each island.
Masterplan area: The walkable area, 12 to 13.43 ha, that each group studied on foot in Chapter 02 and designed in Chapter 03.
Plot: One piece of land with one owner or one building.
Hectare (ha): 10,000 m², a square 100 m on each side: about one and a half football pitches.
Land use: What a piece of land is used for: homes, shops, offices, schools, mosques, parks, industry or roads.
Mixed use: Homes, shops and workplaces in the same building or street, rather than kept apart.
Density: How many people, or how much floor space, sits on an area, usually counted per hectare.
Dense: In this book: a floor area ratio of 1.87 or more.
Floor area ratio (FAR): A building’s total floor area divided by the area of its plot. A plot fully covered by a two-storey building has a FAR of 2.
Floor space index (FSI): Another name for floor area ratio, used on the metrics pages.
Gross floor area (GFA): All the floors of a building, or of a whole area, added together, in m².
Site coverage: The share of a plot covered by building, seen from above.
Storey: One floor level of a building.
Setback: The gap a building must leave between itself and the edge of its plot, for light, air and access.
Solid and void: A map with buildings in solid colour and open ground left white, so the island’s pattern reads at a glance.
Grain: The size of the pieces a place is built from. Fine grain: many small plots and buildings. Coarse grain: fewer, larger ones.
Frontage: The ground floor of the buildings along a street as a person on the pavement meets it: doors, windows, shops and blank walls.
Social housing: Homes provided below market cost, usually by the government, for people who cannot pay market prices.
Green plot ratio: The area of planting on a plot, on the ground, roofs and walls together, divided by the plot’s area.

Streets and movement

Pavement: The raised walking strip beside a road.
Micro-mobility: Motorbikes, scooters and bicycles.
Road hierarchy: Roads sorted by the traffic they carry, from main roads to local streets and footpaths.
Street section: A drawing of a street cut straight across, showing the width of each part: pavements, lanes, parking and trees.
Walkability: How easily daily needs can be reached on foot. The book maps what lies within 400 m, about a five- minute walk.
Superblock: A group of blocks with through traffic kept to the roads around the edge, so the streets inside belong to people.
Breeze corridor: A street or open strip lined up with the wind and kept clear, so cooling air moves through.

How we measured

Toolkit: One of the six survey instruments every group used in Chapter 02, numbered 1 to 6.
Theme: One of the five ideas about public life that Chapter 02 tests on all three islands.
Issue: A problem found by walking the site, grouped as Social, Environmental or Commercial.
Gate: A line across a street where we counted everyone passing in ten minutes (Toolkit 5).
Staying and moving: People who stopped in the street, sitting, standing, playing or waiting, against people passing through.
Frontage grade: Toolkit 1’s rating of a street face, from doors per 100 m and the share of blank wall: A active, B pleasant, C mixed, D dull, E inactive. Adapted from Gehl’s study of Perth (2009).
Housing quality score: Toolkit 3’s score for a plot’s homes (human scale, variety, flexibility, uses and ground-floor access), out of 32. 16 or more counts as good.
Layering and stacking: Toolkit 4 asks whether a building changes from front to back and from ground to roof (layered) or repeats the same floor (stacked).
SCER: Spatial conflict exposure rate: vehicle conflicts as a share of everything happening on a street (conflicts plus people staying). 15% or more means vehicles dominate it.
Estimate: A figure worked out rather than counted. Estimates are marked as such on the page.

The masterplans

Vision: The one idea a masterplan is for, in a sentence.
Parti: The main idea of a design drawn as a simple diagram, before any detail.
Layer: One system of a masterplan drawn on its own: what exists, movement, public and green space, other uses, homes. Each keeps one colour on all three islands.
Capstone plot: A plot set aside for one student to design a building on in the next project, 8 to 10 storeys high.
Policy and guidelines: The rules new buildings must follow, such as heights, setbacks and shade, so the plan holds.
Fahi-Malé, Villi-Veshi, Hiyaa-Vehi: The three masterplans, for Malé, Villimalé and Hulhumalé.

Abbreviations

ha: hectare
m²: square metre
km: kilometre
sq ft: square foot, about 0.09 m²
FAR: floor area ratio
FSI: floor space index
GFA: gross floor area
SCER: spatial conflict exposure rate
LUP: land use plan
MDVN, FOR: Maldivian and foreign residents
HDC: Housing Development Corporation
MNU: Maldives National University

All reference pages