Sustainability measurement in urban planning practice: Evaluating the environment plans of the cities in Aegean Region

Abstract

Sustainable urban development is an important current issue in urban planning agenda. Sustainability issues are integrated into planning practices and regulations in many countries. The goal of sustainability in urban planning is obvious, but the degree of the success on this goal is not certain and varies due to local conditions and choices of the countries and the cities, and their approaches to planning problems.This thesis aims to measure the consideration of sustainable urban development in urban planning practice through analysis of urban plans. Four Environment Plans including all eight cities of the Aegean Region of Turkey are evaluated to see how much these plans consider sustainability issues. First, a list of sustainable urban development policies and urban planning actions for sustainability is proposed and then, the urban plans are evaluated in terms of these policies and actions. Written documents including plan reports and planning decisions are used to evaluate the plans in terms of their consideration of sustainable urban development with the plan content analysis method.At the end of this thesis, the level of integration of sustainability in plan making is analyzed and how well urban plans in the case areas actually promote sustainability principles is presented. It is found out that the evaluated plans in this thesis consider most of the sustainability policies, but they do not fully support them with planning actions.Key Words: Sustainable Urban Development, Sustainability Measurement, Plan Evaluation, Environment Plans, Aegean Region.