Inclusive User Experience in Informal Urban Public Spaces

Abstract

The informal urban public spaces include street sides, open markets, temple forecourts, transit spill-over areas, and neighborhood crossroads of the everyday urban life in India, which is a critical but under-theorized aspect of everyday urban life in India. Whereas formal public spaces are generally considered using set standards and regulatory regimes of the design, informal public spaces are formed through ongoing interactions between users, activities, and socio-cultural norms. The paper explores the ways of producing, experiencing, and maintaining inclusivity in such informal public spaces, based on how users experience it and not on its design intention. The study conceptualized inclusivity as an experiential state based on accessibility, adaptability, social tolerance and time flexibility using interdisciplinary approaches in the urban design, environmental psychology, and social anthropology. The study using qualitative research techniques such as ethnographic observation, behavioral mapping, and user narratives, uncovers that informality usually facilitates wider involvement between genders, age, economic status, and ability even though formal facilities are absent. The paper presents the argument that informal public spaces are adaptive social infrastructures, which provide important lessons to inclusive urban design in fast urbanizing environments. This study can help to reshape the current discussions on inclusive cities and to disrupt the mainstream ideologies of the design of public space in the Global South by redefining informality as a resource of space and not a planning failure.