Impact of the centrality for public spaces - a case of railway station

Abstract

Navigation is a process of ascertaining one’s position, planning and following a route. Navigation plays a crucial role in interactions and functions within the building design. While finding the way, knowing the person’s location and the point to be reached is a fundamental activity in our daily life. This strategy is a little more complex in public indoor environments as the buildings have different floor plans, branching out corridors, functional spaces of varying magnitude and with horizontal/ vertical movements. A primary survey was conducted to track the passenger’s navigation patterns during peak and non-peak conditions. Video cameras were installed at important locations to obtain mental maps for assessing the navigation pattern followed by the passengers within the indoor lobby space. The closeness-centrality analysis has been conducted to analyse the intuitiveness of the indoor circulation pattern flows of the passengers by the identification of passenger congregation spots (P-Cells) and Trajectory spots (T-Cells). Since the “correlation coefficient R= 0.76 and P-Value is 0.000374” (As obtained from the analysis of the empirical data), The result is significant at p < .05. we have found a strong positive correlation, that the closeness centrality values of the trajectory spots have significantly influenced the congregation spots (P-Cells) within the vicinity of the higher attractiveness criterion of the functional area. The research is also extended to examine the influence of central access lines (X and Y) on the P-Cells and T-Cells of passengers while navigating within the indoor space. These findings could conclude a design decision towards the centrality of indoor space, with reference elements like landmark realisations and functional object arrangements in a more emotive and user-centric manner. The conclusions of this research would help to draw the navigation models for better strategies like wayfinding, landmarks, object placements, rerouting of movements, and significance of activities, architectural behaviour with objects, de conjunction the navigating passage and visual referencing within the indoor built environments.