Sustainable Development and Urban Form

ISSN： 1832-2077

Source： The International Journal of Environmental, Cultural, Economic, and Social Sustainability: Annual Review, Vol.7, Iss.1, 2011-01, pp. : 13-22

Disclaimer: Any content in publications that violate the sovereignty, the constitution or regulations of the PRC is not accepted or approved by CNPIEC.

Previous Menu Next

Abstract

In the last century, the tendency of population and economical activities to become dense in urban areas has led to expansion into rural areas and the decrease of land uses in proportion to population density. This expansion has caused many problems such as non-economic use of urban substructure investments, increase of energy consumption amount and distance/time unit in trips within the city, transformation of many agricultural areas into urban areas and extravagant consumption of limited resources. This process makes it necessary to re-discuss urban regions with regard to sustainability principles. The spatial reflections of these discussions raise issues including urban development and macro form decisions, function area distribution, transportation systems, settlement size, and population density distribution decisions. Theories about the sustainability of cities focus on the idea of the compact city. Konya as one of the oldest urban settlement areas of Anatolia is also rare as a city having planned development status. However what makes the research interesting is that the city has a tradition of compact development and has achieved a scattered spatial structure by the means of urban plans. The 50 years planning experiences of the city is full of the lessons for more sustainable urban development. The development plans improved for the Konya city as a whole from 1946 until today and the explanation reports of these plans form the basic material of the study. A method depending on the comparison of a series of indicators for the analysis of the urban area usage and population density development tendency in the period of almost 50 years and the analysis of them by the means of geographic information system will be used in the study.