Pluralising Urban Design Theory through Institutional Practice: Agonistic Design Infrastructure in Ankara, 2019–2024
This paper argues that pluralising urban design theory requires transforming the institutional production of legitimate design knowledge, proposing an "agonistic design infrastructure" model derived from a 2019–2024 study in Ankara that reveals both the potential and limitations of integrating civic and academic actors into decision-making processes.
Original paper licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This is an AI-generated explanation of the paper below. It is not written or endorsed by the authors. For technical accuracy, refer to the original paper. Read full disclaimer
Cities are not just collections of buildings; they are the result of countless decisions about who gets to speak, what counts as a good idea, and how those ideas become reality. For decades, experts have debated how to design better cities, often arguing over which theories are correct. But a deeper question has remained: who actually gets to decide what those theories are? In the world of urban planning, a "theory" is not just a sentence in a textbook; it is a set of rules that determines which problems are worth solving, whose knowledge matters, and who has the power to say "yes" or "no." When a city council asks for a new park or a memorial, they are not just asking for a drawing; they are asking for a definition of what the city should be. If only architects and engineers get to write that definition, the city reflects only their view. If residents, historians, and doctors can also shape the definition, the city might look very different. The challenge is figuring out how to let many different voices in without causing chaos, and ensuring that those voices actually change the outcome rather than just being heard for a moment.
This is the puzzle that Savaş Zafer Şahin, a researcher at Ankara Hacı Bayram Veli University, set out to solve by looking at a specific experiment in Turkey's capital, Ankara. Between 2019 and 2024, the city's municipal government and a newly reorganized civic group called the Ankara Citizen Council tried to redesign how the city chooses its public spaces. They did this through a series of five major design competitions, which are like high-stakes contests where architects and designers submit proposals for projects like a memorial for healthcare workers, a new cultural center, and a redesign of street signs. The goal was to see if they could create a system where the "theory" of the city—its values, its history, and its future—was built by many people, not just the experts. The researcher did not just watch these contests; he mapped every step of the process, from the initial idea to the final vote, to see where real power lay and where it stopped.
What he found was a story of partial success and a surprising twist in how democracy works in design. The system they built was what the researcher calls an "agonistic design infrastructure." This is a fancy way of describing a set of rules and meetings designed to let different groups argue their case openly, rather than forcing them to agree on a single, boring solution. In this system, different voices were allowed to clash, and those clashes were recorded. For example, in the competition to design a memorial for healthcare workers who died during the pandemic, the city did not just ask for a statue. Before the competition even started, a group of academics and civic volunteers helped define the problem. They argued that the memorial should not just be a building, but a space that acknowledged public health, social loss, and art. This early involvement meant the competition brief itself was shaped by a wider group of people, not just the city officials. Similarly, for a project to redesign street signs, a civic working group helped frame the issue as a matter of "urban identity" and how easy it is to read the city, rather than just a graphic design task.
However, the study reveals a critical flaw in how this system operated, which the researcher calls a "timing–authority inversion." This means that the most creative and open parts of the process happened early on, when the ideas were still being formed, but at that stage, the public groups had no binding power; they could only advise. The city officials could listen to them, but they did not have to follow their advice. By the time the process reached the point where people could actually vote or make a final choice, the options had already been narrowed down significantly by professional juries. In the street sign competition, for instance, the public was allowed to vote on which of three winning sign designs to use, but the jury had already decided the font and the overall style. In another case, regarding a historic market, the public was asked to vote on whether to keep or demolish the building, but this vote happened after experts had already debated the complex issues of heritage and economics. The public got a direct say, but only on a choice that had already been stripped of its complexity.
The research shows that while the city succeeded in bringing more voices into the conversation, it did not fully succeed in letting those voices change the final outcome. The system was good at "staging disagreement." In the competition for a new cultural center, the jury published not just the winning design, but also the reasons why they rejected others and even recorded their own disagreements. This made the decision-making process transparent, allowing people to see that experts do not always agree. In the market competition, the city allowed three different designs to win equally, acknowledging that there was no single "correct" answer. These were victories for pluralism, or the idea that many different truths can exist at once. Yet, the study found that the system struggled to connect these early, open discussions to the final, binding decisions. The civic groups could suggest ideas, but the city retained the legal power to ignore them. The records showed that while the city gathered a wealth of information from citizens and academics, there was often no clear paper trail showing how a specific citizen suggestion changed a specific rule or design choice.
The researcher concludes that this experiment teaches us that simply inviting people to participate is not enough to change how cities are designed. True change happens only when the rules of the game are rewritten so that different types of knowledge—like the daily experience of a resident or the medical knowledge of a doctor—can actually alter the definition of the problem before the experts start drawing. The Ankara case shows that it is possible to build a system where disagreement is visible and where experts and citizens can work side by side, but it also shows that without a clear path for those citizen ideas to reach the final decision, the system remains incomplete. The city managed to create a space where many voices could speak, but it did not fully ensure that those voices could steer the ship. The lesson for other cities is that if you want a truly pluralistic design process, you cannot just add a vote at the end; you must ensure that the people who live there have a say in defining the problem from the very beginning, and that their input is legally required to be considered, not just politely listened to.
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