Author: OPENACT Architecture Team: Zuhal Kol, Carlos Zarco Sanz, Jose Luis Hidalgo, Meliz Akyol Type: International Urban Design Competition Client: BBB Balikesir Metropolitan Municipality Location: Bandirma, Turkey Status: First award Period: February 2017 - ongoing Project Development phase Emerging against a dramatic landscape in Marmara’s industrial hub- Bandirma, Design Park offers an exploration of opportunities with its diverse programmatic, ecologic and infrastructural inputs. This reclaimed area, from a former industrial/military periphery as a public park, carries the potential to be transformed into a predominant common ground for Bandirma and a regional attraction point in Marmara to respond to the processes of the expanding city and its pluralistic users. The assumed task here is to create links and let new realities emerge through establishment of connections and programs, allowing the park to be activated by new channels and networks between people, ecology and the territorial surroundings. Aiming to create an open, interactive, collective and productive focal point locally and regionally, the proposal introduces the design park as a research and testing ground for the participative future developments; and as an idea factory in the city of factories, where the citizens alongside the professionals can produce and share ideas for their city. To allow for testing of diverse ideas, the project operates at a multiplicity of programs by embracing incremental interventions that are strategically positioned and superimposed in the park. On the intersection of these superimposed program layers, the design institute diminishes the boundaries of landscape and edifices, works as a main hub, and acts as interfaces with the environment-whether mitigating or harnessing it- as a building, surface, or landscape. Taking advantage of all resources already available on/around site, the programmatic ground layers experiment strategies that can be implemented in the future development areas of the city. This intervention interprets the relaunch of expectations for the entire urban area and will contribute to the socio- economic development of the Bandirma and strengthen its attraction. As the programmatic layers are open for interventions of human activities or natural flows to absorb the ever-changing configurations, the design institute produces ideas collaboratively with the inclusion of human and natural spheres, thus, allowing for the design park to evolve reciprocally with the city.