Suryapı Antalya Urban Transformation Project was named first in the "Best Urban Transformation — Ongoing Projects" category at the Sign of the City Awards 2019, organised under the leadership of Hürriyet. The award was presented by Prof. Dr. Suha Özkan, Founding President of the World Architecture Community. BFTA Architects is among the project's architectural design teams.
The competition and the jury
In the competition, Turkey's leading construction and real estate projects were assessed by a jury of professionals and academics convened under the joint chairmanship of Prof. Dr. Güzin Konuk, architect and urban designer, and Prof. Dr. Suha Özkan. Among the more than one hundred entries, it was striking how many were social responsibility projects, schemes involving local government, and exemplary developments in which green space came to the fore.
At the award ceremony, Prof. Dr. Güzin Konuk spoke of the growing interest in SotCA each year and its authoritative position in the sector. She noted that, alongside its contribution to the development of the real estate sector, the competition also contributes innovative ideas to architectural quality and to environmental quality of life, and that over six years local and central government had joined the process alongside real estate developers. Konuk also stressed that bringing the competition together with the RE360 Real Estate Meeting this year had created significant synergy in the sector.
This is a result the project achieved in a strongly competitive field. Projects by Turkey's largest developers were assessed in the same category; the composition of the jury, representing academia and professional practice together, made the award the outcome of an assessment based on design and construction quality rather than marketing success.
A first in Turkey in terms of scale
The regeneration in the Kepezaltı-Santral district is one of the largest urban regeneration areas planned as a single scheme in Turkey to date. The project is set out on an area of 1.3 million square metres, with roughly 19,000 independent units and 260,000 square metres of green space. That scale brings a qualitatively different definition of the problem from the familiar practice of renewing individual plots: what is renewed here is not a building stock but an entire piece of the city — together with its street pattern, infrastructure, community facilities and pattern of ownership.
For many years the area had seen unhealthy development because of unresolved ownership disputes and development rights that could not be used. Once planning and subdivision powers were transferred to Antalya Metropolitan Municipality, the area was taken in hand again; registering title for rights holders, providing relocation and rent assistance, and tendering the construction work nationally were all carried out by the public authority. The implementation, undertaken by Suryapı as contractor, thus formed a large-scale regeneration model run through public-private cooperation.
Why does regeneration in place matter?
The most contested aspect of urban regeneration is that residents have to move to another part of the city. The approach chosen in the Kepezaltı-Santral project is regeneration in place: when the work is complete, rights holders return to their own neighbourhood. A significant share of the housing in the project was allocated to rights holders, and priority in handover was given to this group.
The architectural counterpart of this is that the design must be not merely a saleable product but a settlement scheme that safeguards the continuity of an existing social fabric. In regeneration in place, the question facing the designer is not "how many units will fit" but "which unit will be handed over to whom, and in what neighbourly setting".
The variety of housing types was therefore one of the decisions at the centre of the project: households of different sizes continuing to live together in the same neighbourhood is not possible without a range of types. The accessibility of shared areas, the preservation of pedestrian scale and the balanced distribution of community facilities across the area were addressed for the same reason. Schools, health and sports facilities, cultural buildings and a large city park were designed together with the housing areas; facilities were positioned not as an add-on scattered between residential blocks but as a load-bearing element of the settlement scheme.
The programme of a regeneration on this scale is also part of the architectural decisions. Handing the area over in phases means that part of the neighbourhood begins to be lived in while construction continues; roads, infrastructure and facilities were planned to suit this incremental occupation.
Conclusion
The Sign of the City award confirms that the project managed to hold a regeneration of this scale within the discipline of design. Large scale is often offered as an excuse for monotony and poor quality; Suryapı Antalya is an example showing that scale itself can be treated as a design problem.
At BFTA Architects we believe that architectural quality is not inversely proportional to project size. This award shows that a rigorous design approach also finds its reward in large-scale housing production.
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