EVALUATION OF ECOLOGICAL BELTS AND CORRIDORS IN TERMS OF SUSTAINABLE SPATIAL PLANNING WITH SPECIFIC REFERENCE TO THE ISTANBUL CASE

Socio-economic and spatial development tendencies necessitate urgent, multi-dimensional and integrated measures for Istanbul, which highlight once more the importance of sustainable spatial planning for availing appropriate orientations to the human ecology and the future of mankind in general. Spatial planning could be used as an operational instrument to coordinate ecologically sound socio-economic development by aid of pro-active and preventive as well as protective approaches for natural and cultural environments. The sustainable spatial planning for Istanbul, however, requires a certain scenario based on functional continuity of the life-support systems, which are crucial for the entire metropolis and deserve to be regarded with priority in planning and management processes. In this study, the evaluation was considered as the initial step of sustainable spatial planning for the Istanbul metropolis, in which ecological belts and corridors were treated as essential macro-spatial elements. These prime elements were therefore determined as the main guides for design of the prospective metropolitan macro-form model, which would comprise local urban management issues and give projections to lower-scale planning studies from higher-scale viewpoints in hierarchically organised spatial systems.