**7. Conclusion and recommendations**

There are increasing debates on the subject whether the rational comprehensive method of urban planning can be able to ensure sustainable urban development or not, and whether this type of planning approach has the requisites of the sustainable urban planning. The rational comprehensive planning model is a pure top-down hierarchical approach using deductive point of view. The rational comprehensive type of planning is dominant in many countries, as it is the case in Turkey. This situation in Turkey depends on the law accepted in 1985. However, there were many efforts to change the planning system, it continued as a dominant planning approach with minor changes and adjustments in passing periods.

The sustainability concept and sustainable urban development require many new intentions for the planning or the plan-making process. Governance, participation especially in partici‐ patory democratic planning, use of indicators, existence of efficient feedback mechanism, and monitoring process are some novelties for the sustainable-based urban planning.

Regarding the existing planning approach and the sustainable urban planning concept, the most important question is how to adapt the sustainability concept to the rational compre‐ hensive planning process without a paradigm shift in the Turkish spatial planning system.

As mentioned earlier, the Turkish planning system is a rational comprehensive process having substantial efforts to maintain sustainability. With regard to deficiencies of the planning process, several measures or precautions can be taken within the existing plan-making process in order to adapt sustainable planning requisites.

This can be held without a total system change, but with some serious and radical adjust‐ ments in the process. National and regional decisions can be made from the upper scale decisions but these decisions have to be transformed and adapted to the levels of Master Development Plans and Implementation Plans. Most problems about urban sustainability arise at these lower scales.

First keyword for the change is the participation. Citizen participation in the process has to be achieved in an active way. Meetings and open workshops will be the main instruments. People who own land in the planning area can be informed completely by this way and as this situation is legalized decisions will be taken at consensus and there will be no need for court cases. Planners have to persuade these people in a peaceful manner and this is possible when faceto-face active participation takes place in the planning process. The situation does not affect the role of urban planner as a decision maker, but adds a new mission and a new role for planners as a persuader and intermediator. Though the planning process can take a bit longer, implementation will be guaranteed. There will also be several feedback on decision and all these feedback lead to healthy decision making.

The second important factor is the monitoring process. Monitoring can be completed easily with the help of participation. Here, participation is related to the acts of several public institutions and landowners that control and direct the land development programs.

Monitoring processes are mostly used for the control of the sustainability indicators that have to be included into the planning process.

The sustainability indicators can be added to the process at different plan levels such as at the Environmental Order Plan level, Master Development Plan level, and at the Implementation Plan level. These indicators can be related to the following sustainability criteria:

At Environmental Order Plan Level (scale of 1/50,000)


One of the most important bottlenecks of the Turkish planning process is the lack of partici‐ pation even though the "participation" concept takes place in the Turkish planning system. On the other hand, this does not fulfill the conditions that sustainable type of planning requires. In Turkey, the participation of citizens to planning is achieved by two ways. One is participa‐ tion in questionnaires and surveys before the plan-making process and the second one is related to gathering information from the prepared plan itself. After completion of Master and Implementation plans, these plans are exhibited on municipality boards. This is for gather‐ ing information of the landowners about their parcels. Citizens can make their objections to the plan within a month time. Usually, nobody has information that plans are exhibited on the Municipal Boards unless they see or heard about by chance. These two situations about participation have no relation with participatory democratic planning. As a result, citizens are given no right to have opinions about the plan throughout the plan-making process. Even, they did not know the existence of such a planning process. This condition is also valid for other public institutions. The court cases of the plan conflict between the Public Treasury Office as owner of public lands and Municipalities as making and approving urban plans, which are

Though there is an obligation to take decisions about all institutions in the planning process, this is not a guarantee that the participation of institutions to the planning process is treated in a proper way. These decisions are taken from only relevant institutions on relevant lands,

All these findings clearly indicate that the Turkish current planning system is not emphasiz‐ ing governance though this concept is given much importance in the stage of Strategic Spatial Plans. As the hierarchy of the plan scales is lowered, government-dictated decisions become

There are increasing debates on the subject whether the rational comprehensive method of urban planning can be able to ensure sustainable urban development or not, and whether this type of planning approach has the requisites of the sustainable urban planning. The rational comprehensive planning model is a pure top-down hierarchical approach using deductive point of view. The rational comprehensive type of planning is dominant in many countries, as it is the case in Turkey. This situation in Turkey depends on the law accepted in 1985. However, there were many efforts to change the planning system, it continued as a dominant planning

The sustainability concept and sustainable urban development require many new intentions for the planning or the plan-making process. Governance, participation especially in partici‐ patory democratic planning, use of indicators, existence of efficient feedback mechanism, and

monitoring process are some novelties for the sustainable-based urban planning.

the best examples for this situation.

dominant instead of governance principles.

**7. Conclusion and recommendations**

approach with minor changes and adjustments in passing periods.

not for the whole plan.

286 Sustainable Urbanization

**•** Satisfying all actors,


With several interventions to the Turkish planning process, it has a potential to adapt sustainable type of urban planning. These interventions are related to the variables of citizen participation, monitoring, and sustainability indicators as these are the most common and important determinants of sustainable urban planning. Sustainable urban planning is not a new paradigm. It is a broader phenomenon that all types of planning approaches and planning processes have to adapt.
