Social, environmental, and economic problems related to urban living have surpassed the agenda of policy and decision-makers as well as general public opinion in recent decades. To address urban and environmental issues, it is pivotal to examine how people think, feel, judge, and act with respect to sustainability. While some prominent theories exist and various attempts have been made to propose synthesized models, there are still gaps and discrepancies within the literature of environmental psychological theories. As such, the aim of this paper is to critically review the literature by focusing on a few of the most influential environmental, prosocial, and psychological behaviour theories, which include Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB), Norm Activation Theory (NAT), Value-Belief-Norm Theory (VBN), and the New Environmental Paradigm (NEP). The Scopus database has been searched systematically for the relevant studies. This paper concludes that an integrative approach to urban sustainability understanding and behaviour is needed. A framework is presented that consists of three layers of clustered components: (1) internal socio-psychological determinants, (2) personality traits, and (3) influencing external factors such as social, cultural, economic, and institutional factors. The model proposed in the study provides opportunities to further develop theoretical approaches and establish new measures of an Urban Sustainability Understanding and Behaviour assessment.

Urban Sustainability and Smartness Understanding (USSU) can be defined by a group of sociopsychological determinants (such as awareness, perception, attitude and behavior) which shapes the relationship between human beings and the environment in which they live. A variety of influencing factors must exist in relation to USSU, however, a comprehensive examination of these, looking at personal, social, environmental, economic, technical, and governance perspectives in an urban context, appear to be less well researched. As such this paper provides an exploratory and critical evaluation of the literature by focusing on the USSU determinants; with an aim toward identifying the key factors (and sub-factors) that are in relation with these determinants. Two big databases of Scopus and Web of Science—have been searched systematically for the relevant studies. Therein it is observed how these factors affect USSU according to the characteristics of the study. Sustainability focused studies were found to be more commonplace than smartness studies. Moreover, there is currently ambiguity in evaluating the impacts of the identified factors. This paper concludes that a holistic approach is needed for clarifying the relationship and causality between sociopsychological determinants on Urban Sustainability and Smartness context. A framework with six dimensions is presented to initiate future studies to develop a consistent; coherent and comprehensive methodology to assess an individuals’ USSU.

The success of urban sustainability is very much dependent on a number of human factors. Therefore, it becomes even more important to explore how people understand urban sustainability and how they behave accordingly. Based on a formerly developed conceptual framework and on specified influencing factors, this study aimed to evaluate and elucidate the urban sustainability understanding and behavior of individuals in the city of Istanbul. This was assessed through the use of a quantitative questionnaire survey of 535 respondents. Therein, socio-psychological processes of sustainability understanding (i.e., determinants of awareness, perception, and attitude) and sustainability behaviors along with personality traits and influential factors were assessed and analyzed through the use of bivariate and multivariate methods (i.e., correlation tests, ANOVA, t-tests, and multiple linear regression). The results showed that sustainability awareness was more strongly correlated with attitude than perception, whereas behavior was found to be strongly correlated with both awareness and attitude and was (significantly) predicted by all determinants. The associations/influences of personality traits with determinants were found to be mostly insignificant. Conversely, for behavior, they were significant. The most influential factors found (in hierarchical ordering) were awareness of consequences, trust in society, social appraisement, world-mindedness, willingness to pay, trust in science and technology, ascription of responsibility, age and gender.