Shophouses

A shophouse is a vernacular architectural building type that is commonly seen in areas such as urban Southeast Asia. Shophouses are mostly two or three stories high, with a shop on the ground floor for mercantile activity and a residence above the shop. This mixed-use building form characterises the historical centres of most towns and cities in the Southeast Asia region.

Typically, shophouses consist of shops on the ground floor which open up to a public arcade or "five-foot way", and which have residential accommodation upstairs. Shophouses, like terraced houses in England and townhouses in the U.S., abut each other to form rows with regular facade, with fire walls between them and adherence to street alignment.

As its name suggests, a shophouse often contains a shop with separate residential spaces. More generally, space occupied by the former contains a semi-public function. While this usually is, and historically usually was, a shop, it could just as easily be a food and beverage outlet (e.g. coffeeshop or bar), a service provider (e.g. clinic or barber), an industrial activity (e.g. cottage industry or auto workshop) or a community space (e.g. a school or clan association). Residential spaces are meant to accommodate one or more families, or serve as a dormitory for single workers. Popular belief holds that shophouses were initially occupied by single families, with their private living areas in one space and the more public family business in another. However, it is possible that the two spaces were always usually used by unrelated persons or groups, who may be tenants or resident owners. The position of the shop and residential space depends on the number of floors of the shophouse: A single storey shophouse tends to include residential space behind the shop, while residential spaces in shophouses of two or more storeys are typically located above the shop.

Due to constraints in building technology, early shophouses in the 19th and early 20th centuries were generally low rise buildings with numbers of floors averaging between one and three, with two storey variations being the most abundant. Three storey shophouses are most common in central cores of towns and cities with higher levels of prosperity and population density, and pre-war shophouses with up to four storeys existed later in the first half of the 20th century with the advent of modern construction materials like reinforced concrete.

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