Integrating sustainable development approach to spatial planning practice: Sustainability assessment and the case of Turkey

Sustainable development is a well-known and widely used concept but there have been serious difficulties in integrating the term with spatial planning practice because of lack of adequate experience and the recognition of the means of implementation.?Sustainability Assessment? is the current method of preparing a new plan/document which adapts sustainability principles or assessing the existing documents in the light of sustainability principles. Understanding of the purpose and the methods of sustainability assessment is very important because it describes an analytic and integrated process for implementing sustainability development in spatial planning.In this study, the existing impact assessment methods and Sustainability Assessment method, which has been transferred to the implementation recently, will be examined and compared, then the integration of spatial planning is revealed. Through an examination of both existing literature and country examples, Sustainability Assessment model that can be used in spatial planning is developed. Finally, the model developed is tested on two samples of spatial planning.