International approaches to sustainable human settlements: The United Nations (UN)-HABİTAT experiences

In the 1970s, the first concrete step was taken by the United Nations (UN), with the nation-states acknowledging the consequences of rapid urbanization. The Human Settlement Program (HABİTAT) was established by the UN and it began to organize HABITAT Conferences every twenty years. HABITAT Conferences which seek solutions to the problems of human settlements at the international level, have global and national importance in terms of the decisions, solutions, suggestions and commitments they have taken since the period they were held. HABITAT Conferences are activities that refer to both academic and practical studies on human settlements with their main conferences held every twenty years, as well as interim conferences, interim meetings and documents that feed these main conferences. The aim of the thesis is to reveal the contribution made to the field of urban planning and international literature by examining the emergence process of the concepts in the HABITAT Conferences organized by the UN for human settlements and by determining the concepts in the documents that are the concrete outputs of the HABITAT Conferences held so far. Within the scope of this purpose, first of all, the UN's approaches to human settlements are presented in the thesis, then the functioning of the conferences and the emergence of the conference texts are examined by addressing the experiences of the HABITAT II Conference that Turkey directly experienced and the HABITAT III Conference that was indirectly experienced. With the qualitative and quantitative analyzes made over the conference texts, the innovative concepts brought to urban planning were determined, and the effect of these concepts on international literature was determined. As a result of this study, it was determined that HABITAT Conferences contributed to the international literature through themes and concepts by taking into account the conferences held before it and by introducing innovative concepts that guide the conferences held after them.