Browsing by Author "Yigitcanlar, T."

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Open Access
Ecological approaches in planning for sustainable cities: a review of the literature
(2015-03) Yigitcanlar, T.; Dizdaroğlu, Didem
Rapid urbanization has brought environmentally, socially, and economically great challenges to cities and societies. To build a sustainable city, these challenges need to be faced efficiently and successfully. This paper focuses on the environmental issues and investigates the ecological approaches for planning sustainable cities through a comprehensive review of the relevant literature. The review focuses on several differing aspects of sustainable city formation. The paper provides insights on the interaction between the natural environment and human activities by identifying environmental effects resulting from this interaction; provides an introduction to the concept of sustainable urban development by underlining the important role of ecological planning in achieving sustainable cities; introduces the notion of urban ecosystems by establishing principles for the management of their sustainability; describes urban ecosystem sustainability assessment by introducing a review of current assessment methods, and; offers an outline of indexing urban environmental sustainability. The paper concludes with a summary of the findings.
Open Access
Integrating urban ecosystem sustainability assessment into policy-making: insights from the Gold Coast City
(Routledge, 2016) Dizdaroğlu, Didem; Yigitcanlar, T.
This paper introduces a policy-making support tool called ‘Micro-level Urban-ecosystem Sustainability IndeX (MUSIX)’. The index serves as a sustainability assessment model that monitors six aspects of urban ecosystems – hydrology, ecology, pollution, location, design, and efficiency – based on parcel-scale indicators. This index is applied in a case study investigation in the Gold Coast City, Queensland, Australia. The outcomes reveal that there are major environmental problems caused by increased impervious surfaces from growing urban development in the study area. The findings suggest that increased impervious surfaces are linked to increased surface runoff, car dependency, transport-related pollution, poor public transport accessibility, and unsustainable built environment. This paper presents how the MUSIX outputs can be used to guide policy-making through the evaluation of existing policies.
Open Access
Towards prosperous sustainable cities: a multiscalar urban sustainability assessment approach
(Elsevier, 2015-01) Yigitcanlar, T.; Dur, F.; Dizdaroğlu, Didem
Prosperity and environmental sustainability of cities are inextricably linked. Cities can only maintain their prosperity when environmental and social objectives are fully integrated with economic goals. Sustainability assessment helps policy-makers decide what actions they should and should not take to make our cities more sustainable. There are numerous models available for measuring and evaluating urban sustainability; they focus their analysis on a specific scale-i.e., micro, mezzo, or macro. In most cases, these results are inadequate for the other scales, though generating reliable results for that particular scale. The paper introduces a multiscalar urban sustainability approach by linking two sustainability assessment models evaluate sustainability performances in micro- and mezzo-levels and generate multiscalar results for the macro-level. The paper tests this approach in Gold Coast, Australia, and sheds light on the development of a more accurate sustainability analysis that may be interconnected with UN-Habitat's City Prosperity Index.