A Study on understanding the social interaction arises from urban park environment through different interaction types;

Abstract

In 1990s, the decrement of non-built up areas due to urbanization in Sri Lanka cause for reducing the quality of life and emerging of social issues by interruption of human interaction with the busiest monotonous life styles. The urban beautification projects like urban park concept was introduced to achieve the Sri Lankan sustainable vision by 2030 by developing those spaces as social spaces for the purpose of community gathering and interaction. With this emerging concept, there is no such consideration or the research regarding identification of social interaction types in park to increase the park planning potentials in Sri Lanka by achieving the social sustainability of the place via social interaction. Above mentioned objective of the research is overcome through the theoretical framework of “social network theory” by understanding the actor and user types in the urban park context in Sri Lanka especially for Colombo district which have dissimilarity of availability of design characteristics. The methodology of the research is consisted with onsite observations and questionnaire surveys under mixed method approach. There are different intensity of social interactions were happened in three selected parks, from these the social interactions highly occurred among adults-adults user category and the least social interaction can be seen among children-younger user category in three parks and the highest expected factor for interaction is accessibility rather than consideration other factors. Additionally, provide shady greenery areas with multi-diverse activities for all user and actor categories based on respondents’ comments will be needed to consider in increasing the future planning potentials to achieve social sustainability of the urban parks via social interaction in Sri Lanka.