Public Policies for Improving Physical Place Quality in Cities of Northern Cyprus

In this research, it is claimed that physical place quality in cities can be improved through appropriate public policies. Being aware of the importance of liveability concept for cities, quality of place issue, which is a dimension of liveability, has been focused on. Depending on this claim, first of all quality of place concept is explored deeply with different approaches of several scholars and defined with its attributes and indicators. Then the public policies, which would need to be integrated into planning systems, has been searched for their role and contributions to the place quality. Conscious about the importance, a basis for determination of public policies have been provided for improving physical place quality within planning systems. For making such a study, it is needed to search for different planning systems in a comparable manner to find out the way for most appropriate integration of physical place quality attributes. The most appropriate integration of physical place quality attributes has been determined through exploring alternatives for implementation of planning decisions. It should be noted that, urban plans by nature consist planning policies and planning tools and most of the time public policies are disregarded. Therefore, planning policies and planning tools are going to be explained briefly, and public policies will be the focus. Based on the observations, it is claimed that cities of Northern Cyprus suffer from low quality places. Furthermore, preliminary research reveals that, there are no planning tools in Cyprus Planning System. Therefore, it is obvious that there is a significant gap in the planning and implementation process in Cyprus. In this context public policies gain significant role for the implementation of planning decisions. So that, it is a crucial need to integrate physical place quality attributes as public policies within planning system in Cyprus. In that sense, Nicosia that is the first city to have Master Plan is going to be studied as a case in this thesis.