The Usage of Infrastructural Volumes as Sustainable Democratic Public Platforms

Abstract

Our current era is defined by the sociopolitical movement known as democracy. Its inclusiveness has confirmed equity in society and improved the idea of "publicness" in numerous built and unbuilt forms. How architecture expresses democracy in the built public space is an intriguing topic to investigate since it serves as a reflection of the way of life that people of a particular era admired. The analytical assumption of research, which is based on the concept that public architecture/space should be a "democratic" setup that is open and accessible to people from all walks of life, has been explored in the process of doing so. The fundamental research question for the study has been established by the aforementioned hypothesis: How can a democratic (barrier-free) use of public architecture and space be determined? What are the public architectural design methods, concepts, and approaches to establish the democracy to empower democratic public activities? Both a requirement and a quality of better public architecture is democracy in a public setting. However, a significant amount of public architecture created for people's benefit is sometimes absent from what we generally refer to as public buildings. The usage of infrastructural volumes to create democratic public platforms as a solution to the above problem is questioned through this research. The three illustrative cases and the extortion case data collection methodology begin with literature reviews on each country's historical, sociocultural, and political backgrounds. Following the exploration, the data will be sorted into graphs and charts for future use. The author will next use an analytical framework he established utilizing earlier work on the subject to analyze these facts. Then, using a critical analysis of all three situations, final conclusions and remarks are differentiated. At first, a theoretical framework was constructed, and context was examined, as well as international instances. The case study, which focuses on the Pettah neighborhood in Colombo, was examined using data acquired from interviews, reports, newspapers, magazines, and a variety of other sources. The nature of the study made it wide and cross-disciplinary. As a result, the scope of the investigation was carefully narrowed without compromising it. The study was carried out in a narrative manner with the aim of portraying it in comprehensive form because the research investigated social-physical processes.