Bursa Otosansit Masterplan
Bursa / Turkey, 2016

The very first thing we prioritized in Yigitler Auto Industrial Estate’s new urban design problem to accommodate both residential and commercial areas was its relationship with the city. While on the northern part having the light rail transportation line and Ankara-Bursa highway, the site was also the neighbor of priority one preservation site Cumalikizik district, a rare example of a well reserved Ottoman neighborhood, on the southern part. This critical relationship of the site with its surroundings made the design problem more complicated.

What would be the relationship of the design area with Cumalikizik? And what would be effects of it to Cumalikizik? Is it possible to provide an integrative design solution which incorporates both the city center and Cumalikizik? After discussions over these questions, we believed that the existing 30m wide vehicle road, which -starting from northern road provides the connection to the city center, should transform into a green belt. This green belt would act as gateways at northern part towards the city and at southern part towards Cumalikizik. The decision to whether leave the road as a vehicular road or transform into a large pedestrian alley was left to be determined in time. In order to solve the vehicular density and car park problems during tourist trips to Cumalikizik, light rail transportation systems can be extended and/or a a telpher can be planned. Therefore, since this decision would result in a solution where vehicular entrance is limited, supportively car parks are introduced under the green belt. Then we turned our heads to the life that would take place in this district, started to create ideas by focusing on the urban life.

Project facts

Architectural Design: R.Güneş Gökçek

Architectural office: YPM

Project team: Çağrı Çağır, Hazal Uçak

Project date: 2016

Land area: 716.000m2

What sort of a daily life would take place in this district? Is it possible to create a cozy neighborhood feeling in such a large urban plot? Could we reinterpret this daily life at the skirts of already living and well protected Ottoman Neighborhood? In Ottoman cities, a central mosque and commercial areas wrapped around together would generate the social life. While mosque being the intersection of workers and visitors during daytime, neighboring residential areas with their dead end streets would create a secure, controlled district that belonged to all inhabitants. But then, especially after the roads are arranged in grids and continuity among them is provided, this introversion was started to be created within each and every building plots themselves. Then we missed being a community, an inhabitant of a neighborhood. Instead of going back to the same urban setup, we created well protected introverted large neighborhoods within urban plots that communicate only through themselves but not their surroundings. Every day, in adverts, residential projects that are claimed to be self-sufficient were promoted. Yet, none of these project was in fact could create the feeling of being a part of a community. On the contrary, people started to seek for their safe space in their own environment, by shutting themselves down at their homes. That is why our cities became cities for individuals. But how can we achieve to create neighborhoods again?

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The solution was in fact right in front of our eyes, in the adjacent Cumalikizik district. Proposed green belt was going to be surrounded by commercial activities, the existing mosque would be preserved and it would be both better defined and also supported by the commercial district, green belt, with its newly introduced thematic areas (like educational, cultural, and recreational), would generate the social and commercial axis area by being an intersection area where inhabitants of neighborhood meet with visitors that passing through to Cumalikizik. Remaining areas where residential district is located were planned to be fed by surrounding vehicular roads from the city while creating their own unification and public space from the pedestrian roads expanding from this road. Reinterpretation of pedestrianized street dimensions now creates more walkable areas with appropriate slopes for engineless vehicles.

By this approach, we aimed to achieve the pedestrian-friendly cities that we missed. We envisioned for a public ground with integrated ground floors allowed by the homogenous and one way sloped nature of the topography. With the effect of the slope, ground floor should be an uninterrupted common living area. We added another green belt extending in east-west direction that intersects with the one in north-south direction. We wanted these common spaces to belong to every inhabitant. By customizing landscape elements with their materials and vegetation within each building plot, the feeling of belonging was aimed to be achieved. We differentiated public and private spaces by means of tactile quality of materials instead of simply building walls. Today, investors are capable of building large scale projects some of which resemble neighborhood scale with their population of 5 or even 10 thousand occupants. Inevitably, for investors, the main priority of such projects comes from mostly market needs which are followed by the desire to create brand value. Since construction technologies and demands are alike in these projects, contextual concerns that could provide site/context specific inputs to a project, unfortunately, melts down. Therefore in such projects, it would not be wrong to say that whether being located in Dubai, in Istanbul or in Bangkok really matters. Today, a project designed for anywhere can easily be proposed to a whole another area where even continental context differs. Housing residences which utilize completely mechanical heating, cooling and ventilation can easily gain green building certificates by simply meeting some of the ticks on a check list.

Our design problem is facing a very similar problem considering its scale. We thought about how to cope with this issue. How would we take this project into hand of which the floor area ratio would exceed 1 in an 850,000sqm area in a way to host commercial and residential areas along with the social spaces they need? The answer we found to that question is to create integrated neighborhoods which look as if they occurred organically in time and belong to their surroundings while preserving the same design language in harmony. This series of integrated neighborhoods forms enjoyable, simple yet confident public spaces that are conscious of their scales.