Özet:

İzmir Harbor District as a strategically significant domain of İzmir Metropolitan City has been elaborated with a view to questioning the transformation of the urban design project competition’s outputs into the district’s structural plan. Within the confinement of this paper, the very source of some failures during this transformation falls into two basic references of which are the planning process itself in lack of accounting the region’s geographical features along with ecological cycles, and the breadth of the ongoing argument basically reduced only to providing the best investment opportunities to possible entrepreneurs. So the pinpoint of this discourse emphasizes mostly establishing the new downtown of high-rise buildings, and ad-hoc urban development implication, instead of pursuing the pre-determined visions of the district’s multifunctional nature which were, however, inaccurately laid out within the project competition’s process.  The paper based on the de facto that the harbor district potentially has substantial features for İzmir in competing with some peer Mediterranean cities like Barcelona, Nice, Genoa, and Athens in terms of economic, commercial and socio-cultural aspects. It should be imperative to step into a districtspecific planning and design understanding within a well-conceived interdisciplinary setting, employing geographic determinants and ecological process alike. The continuum of the project competition - the planning process should thus be re evaluated explicitly to address and revise some obvious failures of the process as much effectively as possible. Keywords: İzmir Harbor District ; Urban Design Project Competition ; The Harbor District Structural Plan ; İzmir’s New Downtown