Familiar strangers: a comparative study to understand the social dynamics of contemporary public spaces of Sri Lanka : with special references to two selected public spaces in Sri Lanka

Abstract

The idea of public space has been extensively discussed and debated by Architects, Sociologists, Urban Planners, Anthropologists and other Researchers for a long time. Public spaces play a particular role in the social life of urban areas, whether as memorable, accessible, or meaningful places. However, the idea of “city as a community of strangers” is not new.The intention of this study was to explore the predominant understanding that the urban people are less friendly and helpful than their rural counterparts by exploring the adaptive response behavior and the level of friendliness of both urban people and their rural counterparts to act more helpful and friendlier to strangers at public spaces. During the literature reviewed, it was revealed that very little literature was available and not specifically examined and documented on the level of friendliness of both urban and rural people and their behavioral response to explicit demands in daily lifestyle at public spaces. Based on the literature reviewed, research questions and the research objective was formulated. Two urban & rural public spaces were selected based on criteria developed after formulating a working definition. A System overload theory formulated by Stanley Milgram (1972) to explore the adaptive responses of people and Reisman’s (1983), friendliness scale were applied to analyze the qualitative data collected from 30 conveniently selected respondents while 45 strangers at both selected public space were observed closely by applying participatory and non-participatory observation techniques.The study shed light on the major concerns of planners to create public spaces in both rural and urban areas, by analyzing the usage of the public spaces, the perception of public spaces by users, adaptive response behavior of the user to explicit demands, level of friendliness of the people at public spaces. As a conclusion, the study emphasized that the urban people are less friendly than their rural counter parts to some extent at public spaces studied in this research. Further, it has revealed that the urban people were always respond carefully to strangers as per the Reisman’s self-explanatory statements tested while rural people are opposite of that and they always wanted to engage with strangers.Suggestion were made to study other public spaces based on the major findings and reviewed literature, as well suggestions for future research opportunities.