Design by Competition and the Potential for Public Participation: Assessing an Urban Design Competition on Toronto’s Waterfront

Abstract

Design competitions are often used to select design teams for high profile development projects, yet have received scant attention in the literature. Seeking to redress this imbalance, this paper presents a competition model that was employed on Toronto's waterfront in 2006 for a large public realm project and describes how it was structured around an iterative public consultation process. Although subject to a number of implementation delays, the competition sponsors built a constituency of support for the redevelopment project by taking the unusual step of engaging lay people in the decision-making process. The paper argues that the competition struck a balance between lay input and professional knowledge and contends that future research efforts should continue to explore means by which public participation can be integrated into design competitions.

Urban transformation through national innovation competitions: Lessons from the UK’s Future City Demonstrator initiative

“…The 'CDMX Challenge Innovation Contest' in Mexico City, for example, ongoing at the time of writing in 2020, aims to find IT solutions to the city's challenges in the areas of circular economy and urban mobility: the competition is supported by the city's government, but was instigated by Finnish digital innovation Ultrahack in association with various industrial partners (RETO CDMX, n.d.). Also outside the scope of this paper, competitions are often run to select design teams for specific publicly funded developments such as new buildings and civic spaces (White, 2014).…”

Crafting a planning issue with citizens in the context of planning competition: a case of ‘Nordic Superblock’

“…Although some form of public engagement is typically involved, competitions have traditionally been expert-dominated practices, with a strong focus on the peer review process (Kazemian and Rönn 2009). Adding citizen participation to competitions, it has been argued, would make them democratically more legitimate (Garde 2014;Hou 2011;White 2014).…”

“…Yet little research exists on how citizen participation can be integrated into competitions and planning processes. Collaborative and communicative planning has been under an intensive focus in planning theory discussion in general (Agger and Löfgren 2008;Forester 1999;Healey 2003;Innes and Booher 2010), but studies about the practices of citizen participation in planning competitions are surprisingly rare (White 2014). Typically, the proposal's development potential is one of the main evaluation criteria in competitions (Kazemian and Rönn 2009), but combining citizen participation in this process has not been much explored.…”

“…Its analytical focus is in the development of a planning issue in expert-citizen interaction. Currently, case descriptions focusing on a planning process have a weighty role in participatory urban design discussions (White 2014). This paper claims that focusing on issues and their articulation is an equally important element in collaborative practices with citizens; it is the interest in a planning issue that lies at the core of participation.…”