The Library as an Architectural Typology and Social Infrastructure

Abstract

Nowadays, political and socio-cultural transformations encourage public libraries to become platforms within communities by implementing new changes to their functions. Thus, future public libraries are anticipated to form social infrastructures maximizing their interventional impacts such as transport infrastructures, educational facilities, and public spaces. Accordingly, equal access to resources, socialization, and learning will be the priorities to distinguish the library as a probing place, interrelating with citizens and all surrounding sites.

Transforming typologies such as public libraries into adaptive social infrastructures requires that the concept of socialization be modified in both library's design approach and the library's location with regard to space syntax parameters in an urban context which is one of the objectives of this study in the urban context of Auckland. In the meantime, the Auckland public libraries have tried to develop services; however, the extensions are predictable with limited development. That is why still there is a gap in scholarly research about public libraries in Auckland. In fact, the concentration on libraries' services extension is not necessarily the way to construct/strengthen sociability, but a strategy addressing the public libraries to make connections directly from inside to outside and conversely be a reasonable way which is another key target of the aims of this research study. Hence, the new approach will be expected to boost the opportunity of forming a "public-interior" but in the form of an open space that is not under the same roof to give the term "public access" within the location to break the boundary between the library, location, and the surrounding urban context. With regards to the above, this study reviews a scenario analysis including a group of public libraries in a different country to achieve the experience that leads to a set of analyses on the formation of Auckland public libraries.

This research deploys a range of analytical ways for evaluating the space-society interrelation. As regards methodology, this analysis uses the qualitative method via applying mapping and space syntax methods.

From a practical viewpoint, the outcome of this study has the potential to lead to a model of approach to strengthening the sociability of the future libraries in urban context, specifically in the case of Auckland. Besides, it will also open a perspective, providing insights on possible additional contributions to the Auckland 2050 plan to better incorporate public libraries in each of the four nodes as a part of the social infrastructure.