Fourteenth International Conference on Design Principles & Practices

Abstract

Cultural sustainability is counted now as the fourth pillar within sustainable development plans, equal to social, economic, and environmental concerns. Public libraries play a unique role within cultural sustainability by representing a significant part of the communities’ history and heritage. This study raises an important question; how can cultural sustainability be assessed in library design? The research problem emerges from the fact that most of the public libraries that were established before the information and digital revolution are now inactive and works as books’ repository. Therefore, this study highlights and discusses the development of traditional libraries to focus on the importance of redesigning their spaces to accommodate the local community’s needs. The research aims to shed light on the important role of public libraries in achieving cultural sustainability, by proposing a model for dealing with public libraries based on knowledge activism and revitalizing different paths of knowledge to achieve cultural sustainability. The research methodology follows an analytical approach to consider case studies for traditional library redesign, to come out with a framework-involving a group of indicators for redesigning the traditional library to accommodate new requirements of the knowledge commons, then testing the validity of the proposed model with a local case study. The research comes out with criteria and indicators for assessing the process of redesigning the traditional public libraries to transfer them to an active state to achieve cultural sustainability.