KUALA LUMPUR: Kedah-based property developer Eupe Corp Bhd plans to design its residential projects with a distinctive social sustainability approach to address the mental and physical challenges of 21st-century living.

Acknowledging the disparity resulting from swift urban growth in Asian cities, Eupe said that it will concentrate on inventive building architecture to improve the welfare of inhabitants.

The company has developed four social sustainability principles to incorporate into all its residential property projects, with the key objective of using property design in innovative ways to improve and sustain a person's physical health as well as their state of mind.

The four principles are encouraging the flow of healthy air, developing green community areas, utilising iconic architecture, and guaranteeing smart connectivity both digitally and physically.

"By setting new sustainability directions and demonstrating how this approach translates into market success, we aim to encourage the property development sector in Malaysia more generally to adopt a similar design approach," it said.

Eupe said this approach has experienced considerable market success since the company entered the Kuala Lumpur property market in 2016.

Its first two projects in the capital have won a total of seven national design and property awards.

"They have also been highly successful in terms of sales, largely due to key points in design, lifestyle, and sustainability differentiation," the company said.

Novum , Eupe's first Kuala Lumpur project is a recognition of architectural excellence. The building was designed as a series of interlocking structures, broken down from homogeneous mega blocks, to create clusters of villages in the sky.

Meanwhile, the company said that the real estate sector is still unduly influenced by metrics and short-term concerns, even in spite of the growing challenges and the opportunity for developers to contribute to their resolution through more thoughtful design.

"This leads to sacrificing building design quality that might otherwise be used in innovative ways to sustain the long-term well-being of residents," it said.

According to Eupe, this frequently leads to a recurrence of box-shaped high-rise residential design, which exacerbates social isolation and a lack of a sense of community identity.

It also results in property design that is inappropriate for tropical or sub-tropical climates because it was originally created in colder regions of the European or Northern Hemisphere, it said.

Eupe said that this has led to the company elevating the role of property development in addressing the human side of social sustainability in all its projects.