Sustainable Urban Design Guidelines for Waterfront Developments

Today, studies on urban coastal areas, is increasingly attracting more interest from academics and urban managements and becoming the main theme of the planning. Regarding the planning and the sustainable development of coastal areas, natural landscape, protection and development of historical and cultural values, natural environment friendly planning and design are very important. Sustainability emerges as a dominant paradigm in the world’s coastal management programs and in planning coastal areas towards the end of the twentieth century. All over the world, planning for the development of coastal areas, design and ecological shortcomings are emphasized significantly in the literature. In this context; the failure to provide the integration between urban and coastal areas and functional deficiencies in the use of coastal areas, differences in planning approaches in the development of coastal areas, the formation of copy places and disregarding the local characteristics, uncertain ecological concepts, errors in the choice of the use of coastal areas during the design phase, failure to establish a healthy transportation system, lack of management, absence of a flexible approach in terms of sustainable development in planning and design are the issues that attract attention. Additionally, sustainable approaches to the planning of coastal areas in recent years,constitutes a coherent framework by creating strategies and policies that include the features of the coast, demand for use and resources. Also, waterfront design guidelines prepared in order to implement the planning principles design tools that are successfully applied by many countries. This study discusses the sustainable planning in coastal areas and aims to examine waterfront design guidelines applied in countries including USA, Canada, UK and Australia, evaluates the forefront design principles of coastal areas and develop suggestions for Turkey. Our study is expected to give a new and important perspective to the planning and implementation of coastal areas in Turkey.