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Taking the challenges of provision of thermal comfort as a point of departure, this paper argues that climate responsive urban design has great potential to make cities more resilient to climate change. With a concern of climate responsivity, this research brings a critical perspective on the current urbanization trends in Turkish cities and underlines the inconsistence nature of ongoing urban developments with the foreseen climate change adaptation and mitigation policies. The research is constructed based on a comparative study between the traditional urban pattern that has been developed since the Artuqids era and the contemporary urban pattern that has been developed from the 60s in the province of Mardin. The comparative study focused on responsivity of the produced urban spaces both in terms of both the climatic conditions and the ways which local people uses the urban space. While doing that, the research explored the role of urban space on the provision of urban thermal comfort in everyday life. The research revealed that existing development trends in Mardin leave citizens vulnerable to the negative effects of increasing temperature values and potential heat waves in future.

The annual AESOP Young Academics (AESOP-YA) conference, entitled Differences and Connections, was held for the first time in a Southern Italian city, Palermo, Italy, 23-26 March 2015. The call for papers attracted a wide range of authors within the field of planning and other related fields. Forty-five contributions by young academic scholars, representing nineteen countries, were selected by the conference scientific committee to critically explore the themes of the conference. Over the last few decades, cities, societies, economies and institutional arrangements have experienced momentous changes, driven by globalisation, urbanisation, migration and mobility as well as totalitarian regimes, democratisation processes, and insurgencies. Scholars in planning and other related fields have engaged diverse critical debates to make sense of these trends and their impacts on spatial planning and urban governance. Several post-colonial studies reveal (Chakrabarthy, 2000;Santos, 2010) doubts about the capacity of mainstream and other universal theories to grasp and express the specific relationships that connect global trends with local characteristics. Studies on planning cultures (Sanyal, 2005; Knieling, Othengrafen, 2009;Getimis, 2012) and the methodological approach of phronetic research (Flyvbjerg, 2004) have stressed the importance of local contextual characterisations for the production of theory. Similar approaches in critical urban studies uncover the risk for building generalisations grounded in the study of a few global cities (Amin, Graham, 1997;Robinson, 2011).