EFFECTIVENESS OF SKY BRIDGES AS A COMMUNAL SPACE FOR COMMUNITY BONDING

Abstract

With the demands for urban dwellings and land resources steadily increasing, buildings are growing taller in order to maximize land usage and to cater to the needs of the people. High-rise buildings today try to incorporate all the needs of the people into a single building. Similar to communal spaces on street level where their purpose is to encourage community bonding for people to come together and interact with one another, communal spaces inserted into different parts of high rise buildings intend to do the same, but addresses community spaces vertically instead. It is therefore relevant and purposeful to study the intentions and understand the planning and design of a communal space to ensure its relevance and effectiveness in the community. However, communal spaces today have now become a tool used by architects to achieve their green mark statuses instead of designing them to cater to the needs of the people who use the building as seen in some high-rise buildings resulting in these spaces are quiet and under-utilised most of the day.

This research seeks to investigate and explore current configurations of upper level communal spaces and its effectiveness in terms of community bonding found within high-rise public housing typology by taking a look at their design and spatial planning of surrounding spaces as well as observe residents behaviour and how they utilize these communal spaces provided in their estates.

This paper will attempt to understand the different factors that influence the quality and effectiveness of upper level communal spaces known as sky bridges by comparing different configurations of sky bridges in high-rise public housing typology. Through this research, one would be able to discover if a continuous sky bridge configuration is key to an effective platform for community bonding amongst residents.