Building Humanized City Plazas

AbstractUrban plazas focus on humans. City only exists in the beauty of life on pulsating streets and in plazas. A successful city plaza is not only based on qualified physical landscape, but lively activities taking space in the space. The deep connotation of the beauty of a city plaza is the perfect interaction of the environment and the social behaviors.But the fragmentation of modern urban space form and imbalance of scale deprive city plazas of charm. People do not rely on urban space, in fact no such space reliable, as place for everyday communication. Humans are alienated and the milk of human kindness vanished.We need humanized city plazas, which is highly significant to human relations and social control. This thesis is based on concepts of humanism, from human's point of view, starting from basic concepts of city plazas, to analyze the human behavior and psychology in city plazas through study on action patterns of people in open space. It studies the influence of human behaviors on the design theories and methodology of modern city plaza design, along the directions of sociology and environmental psychology, using methods of investigating, analyzing and comparison. It further explores the scale, sitting space, communicating space, vitality, levels of keeping private or public and appropriate satisfaction of human behavioral habits, on a city plaza. The thesis is linked up with direction of theories in the fields of sociology, environmental psychology and culturology, inspired by studies on human behaviors and psychology and combined with practical project-Da Zhou Ba Plaza in Neijiang City. It further set forth that in city plaza design, we need to seriously take into account characters of human behavior and psychology, introduce caring for people into every stage and detail of the design and only this can we achieve a city plaza environment full of human kindness.