EVALUATION OF ECO-CITY PLANNING PRINCIPLES IN THE EXISTING LIVING ENVIRONMENTS

Abstract: One of the sustainable urbanization approaches, eco-urbanization and/or ecological planning which is developed in order to prevent the uncontrolled and rapid development of cities set out several principles to provide a better quality of life for all city inhabitants and make cities coherent and sustainable with green infrastructure. The planned ecosystems with these principles and making the existing cities more ecologic are shaped by four basic elements as structure and relations in urban development (physical and environmental structure relationship), transportation (mobility), energy/material flow and socio-economic dimension, and the goals and principles determined in this direction. This paper aims to investigate how the change of existing urban areas which have been built with the urbanization process in Turkey can be performed in accordance with the eco-urbanization goals and principles. For this purpose, this paper determines strengths and weaknesses for the adoption of the eco-urbanization principles by comparing areas with different typology of housing and city blocks and makes recommendations. Comparisons are mainly covered within the scope of city blocks and adaptation capacities in terms of green infrastructure such as physical and environmental structure relations, green areas, transportation diversity, energy, recycling, location of buildings and sunshine are discussed. As a result, considering the differences in the typologies of housing and buildings in the existing built living environments in the cities, strategies are developed for the applicability of ecological planning approaches.