Two-Way Participation in the Design of Public Spaces

With the transformations in individual-society-state relations, citizens' individual and collective participation in decision-making processes has increased in many areas. The active participation of civil society in decision-making processes in urban planning is an important agenda item in the Twelfth Development Plan of the Republic of Turkey and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Top-down decision-making mechanisms, a traditional management scheme, are being replaced by bidirectional decision-making methods, both top-down and bottom-up. In this way, in addition to local governments, policy makers and designers, the private sector, NGOs and citizens also have a say in urban planning. Two-way participation in the design of public spaces that are shared by the society increases the quality of life in cities by enabling citizens to have a say in the city they live in individually and collectively. In this study, a detailed literature review will be conducted on two-way participation in the design of public spaces and examples of practices from both Turkey and the world will be examined. As a result of the research, individual and collective actors of two-way participation in the design of public spaces will be identified, participation schemes will be created and typological analysis will be made. The results of the study will contribute to the literature on two-way participation and social dialog in urban planning and architectural design.