Apartment building in the context of Tower block

Multifamily residential, also known as multidwelling unit (MDU), is a classification of housing where multiple separate housing units for residential inhabitants are contained within one building or several buildings within one complex. Units can be next to each other (side-by-side units), or stacked on top of each other (top and bottom units). Common forms include apartment building and condominium, where typically the units are owned individually rather than leased from a single building owner. Many intentional communities incorporate multifamily residences, such as in cohousing projects.

Housing units in multifamily housing have greater per capita value than single family homes. Multifamily housing has beneficial fiscal externalities, as their presence reduces property tax rates in the community. Contrary to some popular discourse, in particular from NIMBYs, multifamily housing are a lower fire hazard.

Ratina is a district in the center of Tampere, Finland, on the east side of Tammerkoski. The Ratina Stadium, Tampere Bus Station and Tampere's largest shopping mall, the Ratina shopping centre, are located in the district, among others. To the north of Ratina is also the Koskikeskus shopping centre. The district consists of a peninsula called Ratinanniemi, which is surrounded on three sides by Ratinansuvanto and Viinikanlahti. Between Ratinanniemi and the Laukontori square is a pedestrian bridge called Laukonsilta, which significantly shortens travel time to the city center. The Tampere highway has good connections to the Helsinki-Tampere motorway and along it to the Tampere Ring Road, and via the Ratinansilta bridge and the Hämeenpuisto park to Highway 12. Ratinanranta is the southern part of the Tampere highway from Ratina, which used to be a recreation ground and factory area. Its new construction into a dense apartment building area of 1,000 inhabitants began in 2008, and the latest residential buildings east of the Voimakatu street are expected to be completed in 2013.

The name ratina probably dates back to the road meaning rata. Ratinanniemi, which lies between the Ratina Reservoir and Lake Pyhäjärvi's Viinikanlahti, remained uninhabited for a long time, until a few residential buildings began to rise there in the late 19th century. In 1874 a glass factory was built on the peninsula and a dozen years later two machine shops, but all these companies remained short-lived. Later, a brick factory and the city's electric power station operated in the area. The first town plan for the Ratinanniemi district was completed in 1886, according to which a total of 57 residential estates were reserved in the area, the smallest of which were for villa buildings. The plan for the eastern part of the Ratina district, with an area reserved for a new bus station, was confirmed in 1935.

In Roman architecture, an insula (Latin for "island", pl.: insulae) was one of two things: either a kind of apartment building, or a city block. This article deals with the former definition, that of a type of apartment building.

Insulae housed most of the urban citizen population of ancient Rome's massive population ranging from 800,000 to 1 million inhabitants in the early imperial period. Residents of an insula included ordinary people of lower- or middle-class status (the plebeians) and all but the wealthiest from the upper-middle class (the equites).

A tower block, high-rise, apartment tower, residential tower, apartment block, block of flats, or office tower is a tall building, as opposed to a low-rise building and is defined differently in terms of height depending on the jurisdiction. It is used as a residential or office building, or has other functions, including hotel, retail, or with multiple purposes combined. Residential high-rise buildings are also known in some varieties of English, such as British English, as tower blocks and may be referred to as MDUs, standing for multi-dwelling units. A very tall high-rise building is referred to as a skyscraper.

High-rise buildings became possible to construct with the invention of the elevator (lift) and with less expensive, more abundant building materials. The materials used for the structural system of high-rise buildings are reinforced concrete and steel. Most North American–style skyscrapers have a steel frame, while residential blocks are usually constructed of concrete. There is no clear difference between a tower block and a skyscraper, although a building with forty or more stories and taller than 150 metres (490 ft) is generally considered a skyscraper.

In structural engineering, the tube is a system where, to resist lateral loads (wind, seismic, impact), a building is designed to act like a hollow cylinder, cantilevered perpendicular to the ground. This system was introduced by Fazlur Rahman Khan while at the architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), in their Chicago office. The first example of the tube's use is the 43-story Khan-designed DeWitt-Chestnut Apartment Building, since renamed Plaza on DeWitt, in Chicago, Illinois, finished in 1966.

The system can be built using steel, concrete, or composite construction (the discrete use of both steel and concrete). It can be used for office, apartment, and mixed-use buildings. Most buildings of over 40 stories built since the 1960s are of this structural type.

Dōjunkai (shinjitai: 同潤会, kyūjitai: 同潤會) was a corporation set up a year after the 1923 Kantō earthquake to provide reinforced concrete (and thus earthquake- and fire-resistant) collective housing in the Tokyo area. Its formal name was Zaidan-hōjin Dōjunkai (財団法人同潤会), i.e. the Dōjunkai corporation. The suffix kai means organization, and dōjun was a term coined to suggest the spread of the nutritious benefit of the water of river and sea. It was overseen by the Home Ministry.

Laukontori (or the Laukko Square, also known as Alaranta) is a market square in the southern part of the city center of Tampere, Finland, on the shores of Lake Pyhäjärvi. It is located just a few hundred meters from Tampere Central Square. Square's beach serves as a harbor for cruise ships to the Viikinsaari island and the city of Hämeenlinna in the summer.

Laukontori got its name from the first steamboat sailing on Lake Pyhäjärvi, the Laukko paddle steamer, which was built in 1859 but scrapped as early as 1864. As such, the ship was so significant that the people of Tampere began to use the name Laukontori, or the square on which Laukko landed. The same berth was later used by another steamboat named Laukko. Alaranta and Alasatama have been used as parallel names for Laukontori, although on the other hand the port of the Mustalahti bay on the shores of Lake Näsijärvi has never been called Yläranta or Yläsatama. Laukontori has officially belonged to the Tampere street system in 1868–1886 and again since 1897. In the intervening years, the market was called Kalatori ("fish market square"). Residential apartment buildings were built on the outskirts of Laukontori in the early 20th century, and the area was a favorite residential area for wealthy city dwellers. In 1905, almost half of the residents of the entire Nalkala district were considered to belong to the highest social group. Until the 1950s, Laukontori was a lively trading place where rural residents who came to Tampere from the Lake Pyhäjärvi area sold their products on inland waterway vessels.

Edgewater is a lakefront community area on the North Side of the city of Chicago, Illinois, 6 miles (10 km) north of the Loop. The most recently established of the city's 77 official community areas, Edgewater is bounded by Foster Avenue on the south, Devon Avenue on the north, Ravenswood Avenue on the west, and Lake Michigan on the east. Edgewater contains several beaches for residents to enjoy. Chicago's largest park, Lincoln Park, stretches south from Edgewater for 7 miles (11 km) along the waterfront, almost to downtown. Until 1980, Edgewater was part of Uptown, and historically it constituted the northeastern corner of Lake View Township, an independent suburb annexed by the city of Chicago in 1889. Today, Uptown is to Edgewater's south, Lincoln Square to its west, West Ridge to its northwest and Rogers Park to its north.

Edgewater transitioned from agriculture and small settlement to residential development around the 1880s with summer homes for Chicago's elite. Today, it provides the northern terminus of both Lincoln Park and Lake Shore Drive. With the exception of pockets acknowledged as historic districts (like the Bryn Mawr Historic District), eastern Edgewater (Edgewater Beach) has a skyline of high-rise apartment buildings, condominium complexes, and mid-rise homes. To the west, Edgewater is characterized by single-family homes; and two-, three-, or four-story flats, including the historic village and now commercial district of Andersonville.

A duplex house plan has two living units attached to each other, either next to each other as townhouses and condominiums or one above the other like apartments. By contrast, a building comprising two attached units on two distinct properties is typically considered semi-detached or twin homes but is also called a duplex in parts of the Northeastern United States, Western Canada, and Saudi Arabia.

The term "duplex" is not extended to three-unit and four-unit buildings, as they would be referred to with specific terms such as three-family (or triplex) and fourplex (or quadplex/quadruplex) or a more general multiplex. Because of the flexibility of the term, the line between an apartment building and a duplex is somewhat blurred, with apartment buildings tending to be bigger, while duplexes are usually the size of a single-family house.

A microdistrict or microraion is a residential complex—a primary structural element of the residential area construction in the Soviet Union and in some post-Soviet and former socialist states. Residential districts in most of the cities and towns in former republics of Soviet Union were built in accordance with this concept.

According to the Construction Rules and Regulations of the Soviet Union, a typical microdistrict covered the area of 10–60 hectares (30–160 acres), up to but not exceeding 80 hectares (200 acres) in some cases, and comprised residential dwellings (usually multi-story apartment buildings) and public service buildings. As a general rule, major motor roads, greenways, and natural obstacles served as boundaries between microdistricts, allowing an overall reduction in city road construction and maintenance costs and emphasizing public transportation. Major motor roads or through streets were not to cross microdistricts' territories. The entrances to a microdistrict's territory were to be located no further than 300 meters (1000 ft) apart.

Emery Roth (Hungarian: Róth Imre, died August 20, 1948) was a Hungarian-American architect of Hungarian-Jewish descent who designed many New York City hotels and apartment buildings of the 1920s and 1930s, incorporating Beaux-Arts and Art Deco details. His sons continued in the family enterprise, largely expanding the firm under the name Emery Roth & Sons.

Jacob August Riis (/riːs/ REESS; May 3, 1849 – May 26, 1914) was a Danish-American social reformer, "muck-raking" journalist, and social documentary photographer. He contributed significantly to the cause of urban reform in the United States of America at the turn of the twentieth century. He is known for using his photographic and journalistic talents to help the impoverished in New York City; those impoverished New Yorkers were the subject of most of his prolific writings and photography.

Riis endorsed the implementation of "model tenements" in New York with the help of humanitarian Lawrence Veiller. He was an early proponent of the newly practicable casual photography and one of the first to adopt photographic flash. While living in New York, Riis experienced poverty and became a police reporter writing about the quality of life in the slums. He attempted to alleviate the poor living conditions of poor people by exposing these conditions to the middle and upper classes.

The 13th arrondissement of Paris (XIII arrondissement) is one of the 20 arrondissements of Paris. In spoken French, the arrondissement is referred to as le treizième ("the thirteenth").

The arrondissement is situated on the left bank of the River Seine. It is home to Paris's principal Asian community, the Quartier Asiatique, located in the southeast of the arrondissement in an area that contains many high-rise apartment buildings. The neighbourhood features a high concentration of Chinese and Vietnamese businesses.