Architectural Competitions in a Maturing Milieu: Mapping the Agency of Actors

Abstract

The last three decades, overwhelmed with capitalist competitive urbanisms, have witnessed a renewal of interest in the relationship between urban form and “the right to just cities,” mainly upon discussions over diversity and participation. The same period also witnessed the triumph of architectural competitions both as effectual tools of agonism and as potential means of cultivating participatory cultures in the production of urban space. Recent discussions, hereof, suggest that competitions’ agonistic vocations counteracted the pluralist. To solidify this critical rhetoric, withal, there is insufficient research on power dynamics, structures, and implications of competitions. Herein, this study, in its broadest sense, investigates the potency of architectural competitions in allocating spatial, social, political, and economic resources and capacities. The work critically and creatively maps the dynamics and structures of competitions and further testifies (potential) agencies of multifarious actors among these, specifically delving into the emergent local governance structures of two cities from a developing country: Istanbul and Ankara. With divergent spatial development histories and trajectories, the two become complementary cases, novel local governance models of which fundamentally operationalize architectural competitions as means of commoning and register a radical paradigm shift. From a critical and comparative framework, the research reviews literature and relevant data and relies on semi-structured interviews with local government officials, city councilors, competition organizers, jurors, and critics. The findings highlight repressive processual components and potential means and methods of cultivating public agency and a solid and longstanding tradition of public participation in urban space production via architectural competitions. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023.