Second homes have been rapidly increasing throughout the world, especially in high amenity landscapes due to increasing mobility, greater leisure time after retirements and development of transportation means. Second home development in Turkey has been accelerated in the Mediterranean and Aegean coastal resorts especially after the 1980s. Fascination of rural environments, low cost of living and accommodation for holiday, considering second homes as investments and future permanent homes after retirements, and less stressful way of living in such coastal towns attract domestic and foreign tourists to buy second homes in amenity rich coastal areas of Turkey. This has been led to second home invasion and construction pressure on amenity rich landscapes, protected lands, countryside and natural environments. This thesis aims to investigate the challenges of coastal resort towns regarding second-home developments.

Since the appearance of steam engines in the late 18th century, cities have been growing with the development of transportation and the consequent increase of its urban population and economic activities. Presently, cities accommodate more than half of the world population and are expected to be responsible for 73% of the world’s energy use in 2030. Cities come to the fore as a problem, being also the roots of solution for current environment and energy-related problems. The Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) and Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) systems applied in Latin American cities have shown the possibility of establishing efficient urban transport networks and sustainable urban structures at low cost. Meanwhile, Asian cities are anticipated to accommodate 54% of the world urban population by 2050. Sejong city, South Korea is the newest planned city in the region aiming to see its completion in 2030. The aim of this paper is to assess the future urban sustainability of Sejong city by analyzing first the Master Plan of the construction of the city in accordance with PEBOSCA (Physical, Economical, Biological, Organizational, Social, Cultural, and Aesthetical) resources, and second its implementation in general with a focus on the expected role of Transit-Oriented Development in particular looking at BRT. Putrajaya’s case is referred for anticipated shortcomings which Sejong should be prepared for. Secondary data and interpretations from books and articles regarding contemporary urban problems are comprehensively reviewed to systemically analyze the influences of implementation of TOD upon urban sustainability. This study revealed that planned actions derived from TOD will play an important role in resolving urban problems in Sejong city by relieving urban traffic congestion, CO2 emission and fossil fuel consumption. And systemic influences on improvement of business activities, government tax income, social activities and equity, and olfactory quality of the city are expected. Therefore, TOD is deemed to be a better option for existing cities and is necessary for newly developing planned cities in Asia and Africa.

Principle of sustainability, as in all areas, is becoming a major issue in urban transportation planning all around the world. Urban transportation political and legal documents are statutory basis of urban transportation plans and projects and developed countries have established urban transportation political and legal documents to ensure that local governments implement plans and projects in line with the sustainability principle. In this thesis, it is intended to analyze the sufficiency of central government&rsquo / s political and legal documents on urban transportation in Turkey in realizing the sustainability of urban transportation plans and projects. For this aim, political and main legal documents of sustainable urban transportation in United States of America (USA) and United Kingdom (UK), which is accepted as one of the leaders in the world about sustainable transportation, are analyzed. Based on this analysis a checklist has been produced, highlighting headings for sustainable urban transportation that should be present in a country&rsquo / s political and legal documents in order to guide and perhaps enforce local governments. Then this checklist has been applied to Turkey to determine strengths and weaknesses of political documents and legislations in Turkey with regards to sustainable urban transportation. A comparative analysis has also been carried out with Turkey, USA and UK under three main headings which are policy documents / guidance papers for local governments, acts and laws / and nation-wide studies. As a result, strengths and weaknesses about political and legal basis of sustainable urban transportation in Turkey have been illustrated and recommendations were made for Turkey to adopt guidance papers and legislations.

This study analyzes the relationship between comprehensive planning and actual development (as measured by changes in welfare) for 158 jurisdictions in metropolitan Atlanta. Relying on ecological economics for a method to measure welfare and planning literature for a method to evaluate the content of comprehensive plans, this dissertation uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. Development is measured for four dimensions of sustainable development (economic, social, environment, and resource) using a modified Genuine Progress Indicator, and the metropolitan Atlanta area is found to have had weakly sustainable development from 1980 to 2000. In all places, economic welfare increased and resource welfare decreased. Social and environmental development had mixed results with about half of jurisdictions showing increases in environmental welfare while less than a handful showed increases in social welfare. Comprehensive plans were found to have a range of overall plan quality scores (the average of scores of policy statements in a plan) from 1.3 to 3.2 with a mean of 2.3 out of a maximum of 4. Of 2564 policy statements, 541 (or 21\%) were high quality statements scoring 4/4 points while 708 (or 28\%) received no quality points - they were weakly worded, vague, and not measurable. The average commitment to sustainable development (percent of policy statements in a plan that are related to a principle of sustainable development) is 39\% with a minumum of 9\% and a maximum of 80\%. Plan policy statements coded for principles of sustainable development were found to have significantly higher quality scores while overall plan quality scores were not found to be correlated to the plan commmitment to sustainable development; this implies that plans are generally either rigid (having highs scores) or visionary (having high commitment to sustainable development) overall. Plan quality was found to have a significant negative relationship with sustainable development, when dimensions are considered. This relationship was stronger for plans completed within the study time period (before 2000), suggesting that this relationship may be causal. The negative result is unexpected and leads to a rejection of the hypothesis that high quality planning would be significantly and positively related to development. On the other hand, plan commitment to sustainable development was found to be weakly positively related to sustainable development although the dimensions of this relationship changed over time. As such, the hypothesis that commitment to sustainable development would be significantly and positively related to development cannot be rejected. These results hold even when looking at distinct growth patterns across the metropolitan region, suggesting that the relationships between plans and development may be applicable to other places.

published_or_final_version / Urban Planning and Design / Master / Master of Science in Urban Planning

Urban planning is not only about planning the city for people today but also planning decades of year ahead for next generations. Growing complexity and dynamics of the urban system make planning, decision-making and problem-solving to be more challenging. In order to achieve sustainable development, the notion of creative city is aroused in academic field and also advocated by many policymakers recently. Creative city notion suddenly becomes the panacea for many urban problems such as revitalizing dilapidated old urban area, enhancing the competitiveness of the city in the global economy, and boosting local employment rate, etc. However, among the polemical meditations on the creative cities notion, there is insufficient study on what vital preconditions are for creativity to be emerged in the metropolis, what creative activities are generated and how actors are interrelated with each other and with the environment regarding social, economic and physical dimensions. This dissertation proposes the “creative ecology” framework for analyzing and contextualizing the interrelationship and dynamics of stakeholders in the “creative ecology” and with the surrounding environments. An empirical study which applies the framework to a local district of Hong Kong, Yau Ma Tei, is conducted. The study tries to trace out the interrelationships of local creativity scene to the environments, and the dynamics within the ecology supported by the comprehensive study on the empirical setting from the perspective of Hong Kong to local district like Yau Ma Tei, and in-depth face-to-face interviews with key stakeholders. The analysis shows, in particular, how the “creative ecology” rooted in a local district operates and how a balanced “creative ecology” can be achieved in relation to the sustainable urban development. The recommendation is concerned passim with cultural policy and urban planning issues. The dissertation is concluded by summarizing the concept of “creative ecology” and highlighting its nature of continuous evolution, as well as addressing the main contemporary challenges while Hong Kong is in the transition process to be a more creative place. / published_or_final_version / Urban Planning and Design / Master / Master of Science in Urban Planning

Culture-led regeneration policy has become a global trend in many major cities worldwide (UNCHS, 2004; Miles and Paddison, 2005). While overseas governments such as the United Kingdom, Japan and Australia have directed their regeneration policies to encourage the creative class and industries; Hong Kong is again left behind. Some scholars suggest that the culture-led strategy can act as the twenty-first century driver for regeneration, able to better preserve social networks and capital, and hence bring greater benefit to the local residents (Szeto, 2007). However, the methods of promoting culture-led regeneration in the Hong Kong context are rarely discussed. In addition, to what extend urban planning could help to facilitate creative class, and its possible impact on local residents is yet to be studied. This dissertation therefore has a two-way focus; on one hand, it seeks to address the research gap on how culture-led regeneration can be implemented in Hong Kong; on the other hand, it contributes to the academic debate by exploring the mechanism of capitalising culture in a regeneration project in order to maximise the ways at which local residents can truly benefit. It is often assumed that the integration of cultural production, consumption and community art programmes bring about the greatest benefits for the local economy, and hence benefit the locals by ‘trickle down’ effect (Binns, 2005). However, this dissertation argues that the community and its institutions play an important role in distributing the wealth created by culture-led redevelopment. While gentrification as well as the displacement of local residents, is usually observed in culture-led regeneration, progressive community planning and community ownership of the ‘Common’ can help in breaking the monopoly of rent and fixed capitals, to the benefit of local residents. The case of Hoxton – with the success of its local organizations in reducing the pressures of gentrification – is studied alongside with a case of similar background, Noho, Hong Kong, to explore new research and enlighten a possible new policy direction of culture-led regeneration in Hong Kong. Both cases are led by artists and creative industries in the area with the aim of revitalizing poor local economies. In light of this, the two cases are compared to firstly address the research gap on the community role in a sustainable culture-led regeneration, and then to enlighten a possible new policy direction of culture-led regeneration in Hong Kong. / published_or_final_version / Urban Planning and Design / Master / Master of Science in Urban Planning

Sustainable Development is one of the most important arguments now a day. How we can make our world more sustainable in nature is the most significant phenomena for all of us. It is very difficult to transform the old, traditional and historically significant places to a more sustainable and modern in nature without hampering their values and historic resources. Cultural significances of old historic places represent the sense of connectivity and provide a continuation of past experience to the present and future generations (ICOMOS, 1999). These are the old urban characters which shapes the modern urban culture and identity over the time. They should treat as the most important belongings of history to go forward towards more advanced future. Future is always shaped by the past. Hence if we forget our history; it would be very difficult to get proper guidelines for future development. It is necessary for us to preserve our deteriorating heritage resources to develop our own future. However, globalization, rapid and uncontrolled urbanization and technological advancement make these attempt challenging. Urban heritage conservation in a very integrated way would be one of the solutions for conserving old values and ideas with their own traditional nature. Conservation with sustainable manner should be taken as the top priority in all development planning agendas. Moreover, proper urban heritage conservation can help to transform historical places as the source of history, culture and socio-economic advancement for the local community and can change unsustainable community into more sustainable in nature. Dhaka is one of the major old cities in South Asia. It has a various combination of historic places and communities which give Dhaka a unique urban character. It has long history of urbanization and this urban growth pattern has influenced mainly by the topography, socio-economic and socio-cultural characteristics along with inherent morphological quality. However over population growth, uncontrolled urbanization, poor infrastructure facilities and weak urban management contribute to deteriorating these urban heritages rapidly. There are several discussions about urban heritage conservation of developing countries but little discussions have found which has focused on the conservation with empowering local traditional economy to develop the sustainable community. By enhancing local economy through proper planning and policy and promote sustainable tourism can contribute to conserve heritage resources of Dhaka and support sustainable community development. Two historically significant communities are chosen for representing Dhaka‟s heritage which is unique in nature for their traditional professions, significant local arts, handmade crafts, life style, religious and social festivals, urban fabric and built heritage. These are Benarashi Palli at Mirpur and Shakhari Bazaar at old Dhaka. They had a self-sustained economy in the past which becomes declining day by day due to rapid and poor urban development management and ignorance of historical values and ideas. However, still these two communities are trying to survive with their own efforts and make them represented of the glorious past to us. The main focus of this study is to revive their past well-sustained economic conditions with proper conservation of heritage resources and community participation. At the same time explore several guidelines of comprehensive conservation for sustainable urban community in Dhaka. The research identifies that there is a severe lacking of integrated conservation policies in Dhaka. In fact, the importance of heritage conservation is still very far away from national planning policies in Bangladesh. Dhaka has several development control agencies however; they are not so well-integrated and well-organized to provide a comprehensive heritage planning policies for Dhaka as well as Bangladesh. Moreover, incompetent rules and regulations with scattered organizations make this problem more severe. The study has tried to incorporate all these issues and formulate a comprehensive conservation planning for Benarashi Palli and Shakhari Bazaar as well as Dhaka. Furthermore, the study tries to accommodate sustainable tourism for providing a sustainable urban economy which has always ignored in Bangladesh context. However, tourism could be a strong way of promoting heritage conservation in Dhaka which has already followed by many developing countries in South Asia. / published_or_final_version / Urban Planning and Design / Master / Master of Science in Urban Planning

This study, with its research question ‘To what extent is housing mix related to social sustainable development of new towns and what is the influence of housing mix on social sustainability in new towns?’ sets out to develop a critical understanding of and examine the relevance and desirability of incorporating customary housing mix practice in developing Hong Kong new towns to social sustainability through providing a detailed account of relationships between social mix concept and social sustainability concept as well as the influence of housing mix to new town development in social sustainability aspect. Both qualitative and quantitative methodological approaches were taken, including a questionnaire survey in a cluster sampling survey approach and a semi-structured interview, to collect data from 100 local public housing residents each at two study areas, Shatin and Tin Shui Wai, which were selected based on the assumption that one has better social sustainable development derived from a balanced housing mix, while one has lower level of social sustainability due to an imbalanced housing mix respectively. Data tabulation and content analysis were used to analyze data collected. Findings and analysis of this study suggest that the assumption of social interpersonal process brought by social mix in the same community is questionable and even not justifiable in the context of two study areas. From this perspective, there is no expectation that social mix would contribute to middle class role modeling and individual upward mobility. The interrelationship of level of mixing and the anticipated social outcomes of social mix in both towns are argued to be impractical. Thus, it further argues that social mix, in the context of both towns, does not promote social sustainability of new towns, from the fact that social cohesion is a vital aspect of social sustainability. Arising from these findings, implications are also drawn from the study that planners may have a relative weak role to plan for social development and the uncritically adoption of housing mix may shrink the production of public housings in future new town developments in view of a current huge public demand in Hong Kong. Although there are limitations in the research design and study scope and a tentative conclusion can only be reached with a selected angle of observation in this study, a more comprehensive and detailed exploration on interrelationship between social mix and sustainable development in new towns can be carried out in future is still recommended. It also proposes that forced heterogeneity should not be uncritically adopted by planners, who can study other planning tools to enhance other aspects of social sustainability of a new town. / published_or_final_version / Urban Planning and Design / Master / Master of Science in Urban Planning

Ecological succession is the process of how natural communities change over time. Succession of the built environment occurs through the transition of neighborhoods. Early examples of parallel transitions include the conversion of wilderness land to agriculture and of agricultural land to urban centers. Energy development or the lack thereof, remains the biggest factor driving succession of the built environment. The following document creates a parallel symbiotic dialogue for applying scientific laws of the natural world to the built environment. This is achieved by examining factors driving primary and secondary succession, in the natural world and the built environment. By analyzing means of succession, it is possible to negate adverse effects through effective planning. Case studies are provided as evidence of possible implications. This paradigm will serve as a blueprint for creating a comprehensive preservation plan which will foster positive economic growth, environmental stewardship, and a strong sense of cultural identity. / Natural laws governing development of the paradigm -- Factors driving succession -- Historic context -- The role of historic preservation -- The case for preservation planning -- Implications of primary succession -- Implications of secondary succession. / Department of Architecture