A Gap Analysis on Urban Sustainability Studies and Urban Sustainability Assessment Tools

Abstract

Urbanization rate has been accelerated especially due to industrialization. This acceleration has caused obstacles for healthy urbanization, (e.g. unplanned cities). Increase in the population and uncontrollable migration from rural areas to urban areas have contributed to this problem. New researches have been made and new terms have been created to solve this problem. Sustainability assessment became one of the popular terms in different research fields especially in the field of architecture and urban planning in recent years. This paper is based on an in-depth literature analysis and on the assessment tools analysis. 200 publications on urban sustainability published between 2000-2015 have been investigated with relevant key words. Besides this literature investigation, 6 world leading urban neighborhood sustainability assessment tools have been investigated. This study revealed two gaps in the literature and assessment tools with respect to the sustainable urban planning. These identified gaps are: the need for taking urban scale into account that has an important role for sustainability and the need for taking developing countries and their high population trends in the global sustainability assessment’ This study is expected to contribute to the literature with respect to the lessons learned from the past and recent trends in the sustainable urban planning at the global scale.