Evaluation of Shopping Malls in Istanbul with Respect to the Sustainable Sites Initiative Criteria

Severe interplays between the environmental dynamics and human beings provoke designers to search for new ways to handle the issue of sustainability. This study interrogates ways to evaluate landscape sustainability and focuses on certification systems. SITES appears as the certification system that this study considers as it comprehensively handles all scales of the landscape studies. Studying on the Shopping Malls of Istanbul Megacity, the projects are graded according to the nine major parameters as “site selection”, “pre-design assessment and planning”, “water”, “soil and vegetation”, “materials selection”, “human health and well-being”, “construction”, “operations and maintenance”, and “monitoring - innovation”. Benefitting from the background of the certification system, within this study, four different techniques developed, which are structured as weighted, unweighted, prerequisites regarded and disregarded. Through these techniques, six selected shopping malls are evaluated for their sustainability levels to generate an available platform to compare both the techniques’ credibility and the projects’ sustainability. Following the implementation of the techniques, 3 of the projects examine higher sustainability levels than the others. Results of the applied techniques represent that among all techniques, weighted ones are more successful due to the details they forward. In the case of Istanbul, shopping malls have problems with meeting some of the significant prerequisites. Therefore, using both the prerequisite regarded and disregarded weighted techniques is recommended to discover the prerequisite based failure levels and identify the properties to upgrade. This study scrutinizes the generation of a quick to implement a pre-evaluation tool. This tool is expected to be both for the benefit of new up to construct projects and the already constructed ones to upgrade the sustainability levels.