Determining and Assessing the Urban Density which is One of the Compact City Parameters: Case of Turkey Cities

Compact urban settlement is one of the approaches that has been often discussed in the search for sustainable urban development. The main aim of the approach is to prevent economic, social, and environmental problems caused by urban sprawl. The compact urban model's high-density build-up approach plays an important role in the context of greenhouse gas reduction policy that is particularly targeted at mitigating climate change by shortening the distances between functions. The purpose of the present study, on the basis of built-up area boundaries of the cities in Turkey (81 cities), was to calculate the urban gross population density which is one of the most important compact city parameters. In this context, first, the present study aimed to provide data to the national literature on urban gross population densities and built-up area sizes. Cities were also categorized according to whether they are in metropolitan municipality status or not, and the strength and direction were calculated with the correlation analysis between population, population density, and built-up area size, and thus population density, which should be used for the evaluation of cities with respect to compactness, analysis was conducted. The cities in our country have high gross population densities compared with world cities, and generally, considering only the population density parameter, they show a profile that provides one of the criteria for compactness