Suchergebnisse

AbstractWith the economic expansion and population growth, water basins have encountered environmental issues, and water basin protection and sustainability have achieved more importance. This study aimed to provide a method to develop sustainable plans for water resources. Thus, it needs to determine the sustainability criteria of a water basin plan and then rank them in terms of their role in the basin sustainability. Using the Analytic Hierarchy Process, the criteria were prioritized by experts with relevant knowledge and experience. The results revealed that in weighting the sustainability factors of the water basin plan, judgments by academics were affected by their fields of interest, and practitioners' choices reflected their organization's scopes and responsibilities. Considering the differences that emerged over the prioritizations of sustainability dimensions, built environment and ecological sub‐factors, it suggests a flexible method for developing the basin plans which is open to future changes.

Urban transformation projects are prepared with the purpose to sanitize decayed areas, to make cities beautiful and to create economic vitality. Since natural hazards threaten large metropolitan areas, urban transformation is pronounced together to mitigate disasters. This approach of urban transformation includes land use decisions related to hazard, risk and vulnerability analysis and to enhance the implementation of building codes respecting the current standards with application of urban transformation methodologies. Ideally urban transformation methodologies include not only physical and economic improvement but also provide social improvement concerning people who live in the area. Urban transformation seems to be the government's primary tool for disaster mitigation by guiding urban development and improving the quality of housing stock in Turkey. Several attempts since 2005 to pass a bill to institutionalize this controversial strategy finally succeeded in 2010. In June, Law No. 5998, an amendment to Municipal Law No5393 of 2005, expanded item 73 on urban transformation projects to give municipalities the power to initiate Urban Transformation projects to rehabilitate urban areas or to mitigate disaster risk. According to this item in metropolitan areas, district municipalities can implement such projects within their jurisdictions with the approval of the metropolitan municipal council. Therefore Istanbul (Turkey) which is the biggest metropolitan area and waiting a big earthquake in next 30 years will be subjected to several urban transformation projects in the near future. In the paper, the urban transformation related to disaster mitigation approach will be discussed in the case of Istanbul in terms of descriptive analysis and proposals for future development.

The 1999 earthquakes occurred in Turkey caused destructions in every field and level in nation wide with the high number of deaths and injuries, the remarkable rates of collapsed and heavily damaged buildings and the interruption of business activities in long-term. In the last 5 year-period, various scientific researches focusing on seismic issues have investigated the relationships among seismicity, site conditions and vulnerability. Moreover, with the co-operations of central and local governments, universities and international agencies, many comprehensive projects have been carried out, such as "A Disaster Prevention/Mitigation Basic Plan for Istanbul" by Istanbul Greater Municipality - Japan International Cooperation Agency. Despite 1999 earthquakes had slight effects on Istanbul, the probability of a great earthquake (estimated to occur up to 30 years), has accelerated the attempts on risk evaluation, development of mitigation strategies, readjustment of disaster management system and so on. The primary studies on this field are focused on understanding seismicity and site conditions at large scale so that the earthquake maps produced show risky zones related to geological indicators. Aftermath of many great disasters, it has been observed that land-use decisions, demographic and economic pattern are the key components which increase or decrease the vulnerability level of settlements. In this context, the aim of this paper is to evaluate vulnerability components affecting risk levels and to explore risky zones of Istanbul. In this paper, urban and seismic indicators (i.e. site conditions, demography, land use, economy) have been aggregated and factor analysis has been used in order to reveal principal components of earthquake risk in Istanbul. According to these main factors, using cluster analysis, the critical zones of Istanbul have been indicated on urban pattern.

"Rural areas are changing" is the favorite quote of rural studies in the last few decades. Although this is the fact, current dynamics in rural areas have become the challenging research topic. The diversity and uniqueness of rural areas, the difficulty to define and classify them due to the last transformations occurred, have led researchers to focus on case-study specific changes. This new dynamism in rural areas can be caused by internal factors (e.i. assets of a given rural region), external factors (e.i. national politics) or their combination. It is certain that the dominant indicators and their impacts on the rural change differ according to the unique features of rural areas. Nevertheless, it is worthy to define common points which have already created great shifts or are able to create further that give new role to rural areas in the global scene. Therefore, in this study, we try to classify the rural changes and we offer a typology of this regeneration which is followed with a SWOT analysis on the basis of the possible and current effects of these changes on rural capital.