Assessing the Design Process of a Citizen-Centric City Center

Saint Petersburg as a tourist destination has done many efforts to accomplish two important objectives – tourism and social development. Accordingly, actions have been taken by the authorities to develop the city in both micro and macro scales. Developing tourism in this historical city has made the city sites meant for the citizens to be filled with tourists. Meanwhile, Palace Square (the old city center) couldn’t satisfy the social needs of the citizens and gradually became the tourist center of the city. If the development of city centers does not match the needs of the society, they will become abandoned and replaced with other spaces over time.
Trying to build a new multi-functional city center, the authorities devolved the design of the city to well-known international design companies for three times. Hence, New Holland Island, the new city center of St. Petersburg, has a unique historical identity and various design stages, which in general, has been a very successful effort and people have accepted it very well. This paper is an attempt to examine and compare different design experiments made by successful international design companies which were never realized due to unconformity with the public needs. We also take a look at the new policy taken by the authorities after observing the actual interactions between the people and the site. The project was accomplished by West8 Company in 2014, according to the demands of the society and also considered opinions of the design team. This experiment can be a good prototype for the development process of Iran’s traditional cities. Hence, we can prevent chaos and preserve the identities of the cities and social interactions in the city by using citizen-based policies.