A survey on the spaces in police substation for improving area standards

The police substation includes work spaces for civil services, interviews, and meetings, etc, and private spaces for rest, showers and cafeterias and so on. Since a large number of rooms for each function should be installed in a relatively small building, it is important to develop an area standard for efficient space organization in consideration of the functional characteristics and usage patterns of each space. The purpose of this study is to suggest the way for improving the area standards for spaces in police substation based on the results of existing standards analysis and case study. For this objective, architectural documents of 161 police substations built after 2013 in Korea were comparatively analyzed. Sixteen of these facilities were selected for field survey and investigated how the workspace and private area were organized and used. The results of investigation showed that there were a number of problematic cases, such as spaces not installed or insufficient, spaces used for two or more functions, spaces installed even though they are not included in the standards. It was mainly due to the fact that several important spaces which had been installed in most police substations were not included in the existing standards. The ways for improvement were suggested like following four points: (1) Modifying the criteria for classifying facility size, (2) Modifying the lists of the required spaces, (3) Specifying the basis of calculation for each space in detail, and (4) Differentiating the way to organize spaces according to the facility size.