Karşıyaka Coastal Renovation Project: A process-based approach to urban design

As the mobility and the fluidity in the society have increased and the economic activities have been globalized for the last few decades, the contemporary city has emerged as a rapidly changing dynamic phenomenon. Similar to the landscape, the city is an evolving, complex and layered system built as a result of natural and cultural processes. In this current conjuncture, a static image of the urban system like figure-ground maps sounds archaic. Therefore, imagining the city as a landscape not only helps to reformulate the conceptual relationships between landscape, architecture and the city but also provides new insights into how to organize the urban space. This paper invites Landscape Architecture Theory to introduce dynamic systems into urban practices that could contribute to the analysis and understanding of the contemporary city. Since the 1960s, landscape architecture theory investigates spatial organization of dynamic systems through the ecological models as a process-based design approach. Karşıyaka Urban Coastal Renovation Project (2012) in Izmir, discussed in this paper, is an urban design project produced for renovation of Karşıyaka coastal area. The project approached the city as a landscape where natural and social self-organizing processes are expected to transform the site. Therefore, the focus of the project was individuals’ interaction with the environment at the social level and self-organizing nonhuman factors as a living system as the natural phenomena. Rather than searching a fixed and rigid spatial frame, the project investigated how self-organizing systems generate a process based design approach to urban planning.

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