CityMaking101: A Game-Based Collective Urban Design Workshop

CityMaking101 approaches urban design through a game-based, participatory method. In the workshop, Bilkent LAUD students took on the roles of different urban actors, mayor, investor, urban designer and citizen, and worked together to solve spatial problems, negotiate competing interests and build collective decisions.

Playing these roles, students felt firsthand the tensions between actors' different priorities and desires, debated what a culture of consensus means in urban design, and explored the tangled, negotiated nature of city-making in a hands-on format. This year's session took a real design problem as its ground: re-imagining İskenderun's fractured shoreline.

The workshop is built around City Making 101, a role-playing game developed by SanalArc and published by ORO Editions, which uses a deck of cards drawn from real urban dynamics to open up the values and decisions behind public space projects. Alexis Şanal, founding partner of SanalArc, holds a Master's in City Design and Development from MIT and a Bachelor of Architecture from SCI-Arc, and works at the intersection of research and design. Güneş Erok, an architect on the SanalArc design team, completed his degrees at the University of Melbourne and practised for nearly a decade in Melbourne before joining the office in Istanbul.