Demand for Public Facility Services and Functions of Public Buildings

1. To satisfy various needs

There is a wide variety of public facilities that have been constructed to provide public facility services. They include those for certain groups of people, such as children's centers, facilities for elderly people and those for the youth, as well as those for all citizens, such as community halls and community centers. They have been built separately for specific purposes to respond to people's needs. The services have been provided not in accordance with the function to satisfy people's needs but by "facility and room names" with fixed roles. Will simply offering space based on the fixed classification by the traditional facility and room name satisfy the demand as the user needs diversify as time passes? The user needs for local public facilities are increasingly diversifying as they are expected to help lifelong learning, support for the elderly and the healthy development of young people. It is becoming necessary to sort out the actual user needs for public facilities to categorize the spatial functions they should offer in a cross-sectoral manner regardless of their traditional facility and room names.

2. Categorize user demand

In order to sort out the public facilities effectively, it is necessary to categorize the space based on an assumption of activities that will be conducted at the public facilities not based on the room names to be set up in the facility. We sorted out what activities are actually conducted, what the user demand is and what the criteria are when they choose a facility, based on a questionnaire survey. The results show that users choose appropriate space in accordance with it belonging to their activity group, individual selection criteria according to their activities, in addition to the number of users and purpose of their activities, when users choose the facility. For example, groups mainly consisting of the elderly and housewives choose the facility to which they can walk from their house, size of the room and equipment available. On the other hand, groups of workers and students put priority on whether the facility is located in an area with a variety of means of transportation so they can gather from different areas when they choose the facility. Groups that play music give priority to soundproof property and good acoustic property of the room rather than its size. Groups that perform dance place priority on the floor quality and whether mirrors are hung on the wall.

9 categories of communal rooms due to their physical feature

Correspondence between activity categories and room categories

Occuoation of users

3. Comprehensive management system to respond to spatial needs

Against this backdrop, it is necessary to sort out the user needs (spatial needs) not based on the facility or room names and classify them based on the actual use rather than the traditional management. To do so, it is essential for municipal governments that own such facilities to manage them comprehensively not as assets of each jurisdiction but as assets of citizens and understand the facts of their conditions, their spatial functions and usage rate. This is a shift of ideas from ownership to use. Construction of such a comprehensive management system enables the provision of user needs-oriented services and review of facility allocation, sorting out redundant functions and supplementing insufficient functions.