A local charity is offering a £10,000 fee to the best entry for designing part of a "city of the future" based at the former Mackie's site in West Belfast.
Participation and Practice of Rights (PPR) is running the competition, with 26 firms already interested in submitting designs.
The brief for architects and urban planners has been created following consultation with families in housing need.
A dispute is ongoing around the future of the 25-acre site, with an urban greenway proposed, which would take up much of the area.
PPR is arguing the site would be better used to provide social housing for those living in dire need in North and West Belfast.
Chloe Trew is the Director of PPR and said the competition forms part of a wider coalition's efforts, the 'Take Back the City' collective.
"It's really an invitation to architects and urban designers to put into reality a vision that homeless families and other members of the Take Back the City coalition have been working on for a few years," she told Belfast Live.
"That coalition involves people from local homeless families, QUB, Maynooth university and the Rabble Tech co-operative.
"It's really about if we're designing the city of the future, what does that look like?".
The charity has laid out an extremely detailed brief on what those entering the competition would need to provide, with the winner then taking their designs to masterplan stage.
"The families have developed a really clear set of principles around what they would want to see, like being sustainable, being inclusive and the brief reflects that," Chloe said.
"We've had 26 different firms interested in bringing forward their designs and that's from across the world.
"We know that there are thousands of families in Belfast waiting on a house across North and West Belfast in particular and that's unacceptable.
"We believe that properly developing the site at Mackies would address around a third of that need, so it's quite significant."
Those entering would need to provide a plan for how different areas on the site would be used, a typical street design, a typical dwelling visual and information on what a typical day might look like for a resident.
The competition closes in September and information on the brief can be found here.
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