Date

2010

Author

Tanrıkulu, Melda

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Within the twenty–first century, nearly three billion people, half of total population of the world, live in cities. It is estimated that in the forthcoming twenty–five years, two billion more people will settle in urban lands. Essentially most of these devastating changes will occur in developing countries, both in terms of the total global urban population as well as increased percentage of the individual country’s population living in urban areas. For many developing countries, the urban population is already large. Further increases in size and rates of growth will no doubt stress already impacted environments and living quality. All cities, however, are not impacting the ecology of the world similarly. On the one hand, developed cities have mostly cope with their environmental problems regarded as traditional; concern has focused to their impacts on ecosystems as well as those larger in scale. Cities in the developing world are more concerned with other issues. However, it is not only the development level of countries but the urban planning and development tendencies of their cities impacting the environment differently should be considered, which comprehensively shows us environmental performance of urban patterns. Environmental performance basically refers to the abilities and capabilities of urban patterns to mitigate their impacts on environment and ecology of the world and to cope with the negative of all. As an indicator of environmental performance of urban patterns, ecological footprints, its reasons and long term effects should be specified as inseparable part of urban development and inevitably ecological footprints of different urban patterns and their effects on climate change should be concerned while taking planning and development decisions for urban areas. The basic purpose of the thesis is to specify the environmental performance of different urban patterns in terms of their ecological footprints through defining the relationship between implications of urban patterns and their contributions to the ecological footprint.

Subject Keywords

Environmental sciences.

URI

http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12611907/index.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/19600

Collections

Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis