Alanya Urban Square and Seaside

 

Alanya’s past contains important specimens, prehistoric and historic, such as the Damlataş Cave, Historic Bazaar, Red Tower, the Citadel as well as the Hasbahçe and the topography of the city dating to the Seljuk period. These monumental landscape assets increase the importance and meaning of the project.

 

Alanya Urban Square and Waterfront Arrangement Urban Design Project occupies a total of 114.500 m² in the area stretching from the Alanya Citadel to the flatlands continuing to the northeast. The project area is delineated by the pier, Hükümet Avenue, and the Ahmet Tokuş Boulevard, and has the potential to offer a new urban focus, entertainment and recreation zone to the currently inward-facing Alanya by stitching the seaside with the city, and the built center with the green fabric. 

 

The major aim of the Urban Square and Waterfront Project is to create an open-space network that takes reference and inspiration from Alanya’s landscape identities that efficiently invites the residents of the city to the waterfront and that encourages the use of the seaside. The most important architectural element of the square, also a collective memory component, is the existing Municipality Hall that contributes to it an urban scale and identity. Designed by the famous architect Vedat Dalokay, this building was taken as an object of common memory in Alanya’s rich past, and was preserved after some changes on its façade and functions.

 

The project also includes the Painters Square, playgrounds, bicycle tracks, kiosks, cafes, cat park with cat houses, pools with a dynamic waterscape, beach volleyball, an athletic beach for activities like triathlon, wooden decks and platform taking the visitors on the waterscape, a stage for open-air concerts, a line symbolically marking the meridian, a sundial and the Piri Reis Map.