Urban social space design in Sri Lanka : an examination of community sense in transitional space in commercial oriented public buildings

Abstract

Community sense in the community helps to build a strong society with physical and psychological values. Each and every motion of the human behavior with persons as well as ith the environment enhances this. Macro forces that affect to the human behavior are also affecting for this. Community sense helps to reduce the feelings of the individual like social phobia, anomie situations. Because of that the incidents like graffiti, vandalism, torture, and rapes and killings which destroy the calmness of the society comes to play. Even the culture, religion and the history which makes the man living in earth meaningful comes to threat because that. When creating or achieving the community sense the environment helps the individual in great extent. The environment consist both natural and physical orientate the man and create meaningful interactions with them as well as with it, to derive the community sense. In the urban situation more than the natural environment built environment helps to achieve the community sense. The buildings arranged in a street or a park landscape with the required facilities achieved this with the help of community interactions. But due to the tightness and haphazard development in the built environment in urban situations makes threat to develop the community sense among its residents. Because of that buildings design in the cities sometimes abandon by the public or they may use it for ill purposes. Sometimes the users of the building destroy its beauty and create a visually polluted environment. This may be done either intentionally or unintentionally by the users. Therefore built environment in the cities has significantly lost the ability of creating a community sense among the people. In the building the trensiuonal space has more value because its main tusk Is to nolo tile public to transfer from on space to another. This has to be carefully done and as this helps to pauses the movement of the public in the building it will be a prime opportunity space to derive the community sense. Each of the building has its own way of achieving it in the transitional spaces. But the way of community sense in the space has to be studied because it will help the others to do social experiments with the built environment and on the other hand it will make easy to derive community sense in space more and more. Ultimately the study helps to create the urban social spaces more meaningful and aesthetically pleasing with enhancing the social interactions. This may be the firs step to achieve the meaningful, social interactions happen in the built environment and create a healthy society.