Introduction

The provision of communal spaces in residential complexes is the contemporary design agenda and space requirement in almost every housing project especially in high rise residential like condominium and apartment. The communal spaces, which defined as the shared spaces are set up not just to serve various facilities and functions but intentionally to provide spaces for communication and interaction among residents and community. However, the created communal spaces are seen to be unused most of the time, causing the spaces to be inefficient and less functional, not to say about the social interaction happened among the community. It is always a subject associated with the discussion of inappropriate communal spaces design led to the disconnection and less social interaction between one and another. Although space design is always the subject matter to this issue, in fact the factors are much broader when the functionalities of spaces are relating more to the study of human behaviour. Therefore, this study is performed to identify the communal areas in a public housing complex by examining the spatial relationship to the users’ behaviour from sociology perspectives and architecture space theory. The study was based on the observations of residents’ interactions happened in internal housing blocks and external communal spaces in the public housing compound, with the comparative analysis to find out the failure of interaction in certain communal spaces internally and externally. In order to address the issue of inefficiency of communal spaces for social interaction, I argue that the neglect of concern about human behaviour in using shared spaces is an issue causing the failure of social interaction in particular residential compound.

 

Khai Sin Lee

Spring 2017 – Architectural Design Analysis and Methodology

Pat Seeumpornroj, Ph.D.

 

Corridor in the housing block (Above) and People are found seated and talked to each other at the corners of ground floor communal area (Below).