Urban Design Competition for the Spectacle of May the 19^th

By the midst of 1950s, Samsun had faced a rapid urbanization without a projected foresight for the future, thus she lost her coastal existence and her natural assetts afterwards. In the 1960s, the Samsun Port across the historical city center (The Ancient City of Amisos) had been departed from the city, from the sea, and had changed the urban texture. Moreover, train tracks were embedded along the seafront, completely separating it from the city. The degradation was so rapid that the Tobacco Pier, where Mustafa Kemal Atatürk first set foot in Samsun in 1919, and hence a very important symbol of the Turkish War of Independence and the Republic, was destroyed.

In short, the green and blue of Samsun was now an obscure collective memory.

Compliant with the focus of the urban design competition, the principal aims of the project are to rehabilitate the seafront, to design according to the existing nature and cultivate that, to create a pedestrian continuity along the east-west axis, and to integrate the city center and the waterfront. The thematic title of the project, “the road to hope”, is intended through the “path to infinity” that is represented by the Black Sea let in through the landfill, and it symbolizes the re-emerging of the traces of the Tobacco Pier.

The project won the first prize in the urban design competition for the Spectacle of May the 19^th, Samsun in 2017.