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How to balance the multiple roles of
public spaces?
Müge Akkar Ercan 1 , Samer Akkach 2
1
Middle East Techical University, Department of
City and Regional Planning, _nönü Bulvarı 06531
Ankara, Turkey (email: akkar@metu.edu.tr)
2
University of Adelaide, School of Architecture,
Landscape Architecture and Urban Design,
SA 5005 Adelaide, Australia (email:
samer.akkach@adelaide.edu.au)
Abstract
Parallel to their rising significance in recent years,
well-designed public spaces have proliferated in
many post-industrial cities, especially through urban
regeneration schemes and city-selling campaigns.
Public spaces have also become the subject of many
research projects that are delivering critical insights
into their changing functions. This paper discusses
the question of how to balance the multiple functions
of public spaces by focusing on the public realm of
Ulus, the declining historical urban centre of Ankara.
It begins by identifying the current strengths and
weaknesses of the Haci Bayram Area (HBA), the heart
of the Ulus public domain, and its multiple functions,
and then examines a selection of student projects
that studied the HBA during a two-week international
and interdisciplinary design course, in an attempt to
show some innovative design strategies for the public
domain. The paper concludes, the public spaces
that ensure the generation of vital and viable city
centres can only be created if the design strategies
achieve a balance between society’s everyday
needs and other civic functions of public spaces.
Keywords
Public space, roles, functions, collaborative
teaching, Haci Bayram, Ulus, Ankara
Introduction
Over the last three decades, with the rising importance of
public spaces in post-industrial cities, a number of welldesigned,
attractive and alluring public spaces were developed,
especially through regeneration schemes of the
derelict lands of industrial estates, declining waterfronts
and city centres, as well as the city-selling campaigns
(Boyer 1993, Carr et. al. 1992, Crilley 1993, Francis
1987, Hubbard 1995, Madanipour 2000, McInroy 2000,
Tibbalds 1992). Despite their growing importance, recent
literature on public space has frequently hinted at the
undermined and over-emphasised roles and features of
public spaces (Akkar, 2007). This paper aims to address
the question of how to balance the multiple functions of
public spaces by focusing on the public domain of Ulus,
the historical city centre of Ankara, that has become
the stage of criticism due to a new urban regeneration
scheme brought into the public agenda in 2006 by the
Ankara Metropolitan Municipality. The new scheme,
suggesting an extensive improvement to the deteriorating
public realm in the area, has opened up a discussion on
the roles and functions of public space. Inspired by this
on-going discussion, Urban Exchange Studio (UES) ’08,
a collaborative teaching activity between the Middle East
Technical University (METU) and the University of Adelaide,
brought interdisciplinary and international professional
and academic groups together into Ankara in 2008,
to study the Haci Bayram Area (HBA), the heart of the
Ulus public domain, over two weeks, as an exercise to
explore innovative design strategies for the revitalization
of the site. Debating on the student projects, this paper
seeks to show that public spaces, one of the crucial
components of cities for centuries, play a wide range of
roles, namely physical, ecological, psychological, social,
political, economic, symbolic and aesthetic [1], and it
argues that genuine public spaces can be only achieved
if their multiple roles are carefully balanced. This paper
initially examines the current strengths and weaknesses
of the public domain in the HBA along with its wide range
of functions; summarises the major intentions of the student
projects; and then describes a selection of projects
regarding their innovative and scholarly strategies on the
roles of the public spaces. In the final part, it seeks to
draw conclusions from the design strategies of the student
projects. It should be noted that the assessment of
‘balance’ among the roles of public spaces is qualitative
rather than quantitative. Thus, the assessment method
of this research has limitations in terms of measuring
and qualifying the extent to which a public space’s roles
are balanced. Yet, it still provides us the opportunity of
making a qualitative judgement on the degree to which
the design strategies regard the multiple roles of public
spaces.
Defining the today’s public realm of the HBA and its
multiple functions
Ulus, designated as an urban conservation site in 1980,
is one of the rapidly deteriorating parts of Ankara. The
Haci Bayram Mosque and the Augustus Temple, standing
on the top of a small hill at the heart of Ulus, is an
integrated part of the Roman Bath to the north-west, the
ruins of a Roman Amphitheatre to the south-east, the Government
Square and the Ulus Square to the south-west
(Figure 1). The public space around the Haci Bayram
Mosque and Augustus Temple was renovated in the late-
1990s as a square plaza divided into two triangular areas
differentiated by a change in levels to define independent