Ranking system for sustainable cities: A case study for Eskisehir province

With the changing production patterns after the industrial revolution, new business areas were opened in urban areas and the increasing population caused the activities in these areas to intensify. As a result of understanding the importance of environmental, social and economic problems arising from these activities, the concept of sustainable development entered our lives as a solution. From this point of view, in this study, it is aimed to establish a city ranking system in order to ensure sustainable development by revealing the strengths and weaknesses of cities. For this purpose, a ranking system was developed for Turkey, the developed system has been turned into a tool and applied for Eskişehir Province. In this context, an indicator set was created and weighted by the questionnaire study. Then, scaling was done using minimum-maximum data values. By using this scale, the sustainability score of Eskişehir was calculated and the results were compared with the Turkey average. When the findings were examined, it was seen that the sustainability score of Eskişehir was 69 out of 100 units and the best performance was in the social area, and the lowest performance in the economic area. It is thought that the findings obtained from the study will provide gains especially for the city stakeholders who work on this subject by determining the strengths and weaknesses of Eskişehir and to determine new investment and policy areas in order to make Eskişehir more sustainable and productive.