Diffusion is the process by which economical, political, and cultural experiences are shared amongst countries. The international diffusion of planning ideas is defined as borrowing and imposition at national and local levels. In the case of Turkey, these experiences are viewed within the context of modernization and westernization. The most significant arena of this process took place in Istanbul. The process of adaptation began in the second half of the nineteenth century with the Tanzimat reforms and developed parallel to the degree of influence the United States and Europe had on the changes in the political regime and identity of the country in the wake of the two world wars. The financial support of the United States and World Bank investments sped up this process. A European Union harmonization process is now under way. The objective of this study is to relate the Turkish experience of international diffusion of planning ideas and evaluate the contribution of Istanbul's spatial formation.

Urbanization rate has been accelerated especially due to industrialization. This acceleration has caused obstacles for healthy urbanization, (e.g. unplanned cities). Increase in the population and uncontrollable migration from rural areas to urban areas have contributed to this problem. New researches have been made and new terms have been created to solve this problem. Sustainability assessment became one of the popular terms in different research fields especially in the field of architecture and urban planning in recent years. This paper is based on an in-depth literature analysis and on the assessment tools analysis. 200 publications on urban sustainability published between 2000-2015 have been investigated with relevant key words. Besides this literature investigation, 6 world leading urban neighborhood sustainability assessment tools have been investigated. This study revealed two gaps in the literature and assessment tools with respect to the sustainable urban planning. These identified gaps are: the need for taking urban scale into account that has an important role for sustainability and the need for taking developing countries and their high population trends in the global sustainability assessment' This study is expected to contribute to the literature with respect to the lessons learned from the past and recent trends in the sustainable urban planning at the global scale.

In the current century, the importance of play for children is a major issue addressed in the literature. Play enables the physical, mental and social development of children. According to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, engaging in play is a fundamental right for children. This article of the convention covers all children below the age of 18 and does not exclude the children with disabilities. Like their peers, children with disabilities should also enjoy the right to engage in play, and societies should use every means available in order to help children play whether indoors or outdoors. According to the 2011 Population and Housing Research, 6.6% of the population in Turkey has one or more disabilities. The target group of this study is 'children with disabilities' who live in İstanbul. In this group, speech disorders (21.9%), and mental disabilities (17.1%) prove to be the most dominant disabilities. However, the number of playgrounds where disabled children can play are scarce in number.

Increasing urbanisation has led to changes in the population distribution in cities and, thus, unbalanced urban development. This study aimed to estimate the current population loads of cities by determining the balanced distribution of a country's population on the basis of the natural, physical and sectoral factors in cities. The study was informed by the following perspective: Cities are not independent structures. They belong to an ecosystem that includes the other cities in the country; thus, their share of the population should be in accordance with their stiffness calculated from its natural, physical and sectoral factors. An outcome of the study is to suggest the city-mass index model, which is inspired by the body mass index, to estimate the population loads of cities. The theoretical model, whose effectiveness was confirmed by the results of the analytical hierarchical process, was tested in Turkey and converted into concrete outputs.

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