Regional planning of urban sustainable development in the big baku area

Abstract

The regional planning of urban sustainable development in Big Baku was undertaken as part of the Baku Strategic Plan prepared by the Architecture and Urban Planning Department of Azerbaijan Architecture and Construction University and supported by the Society of Urbanists of Azerbaijan Research Group. The key purpose of the research was to provide useful information for developing planning and design strategies that will foster sustainable urbanisation through enhancing quality of life (QoL), which is one of the most important principles of sustainable urbanisation on Apsheron peninsula. Another purpose was to explore the impact of environmental, economic, social, physical and health-related indicators on QoL satisfaction among Big Baku settlements. Ultimately, the research will provide recommendations, which will further enhance the QoL in Baku at a number of levels, from empowering communities at a local level to participate in the evolution of their neighbourhoods to infl uencing institutional and corporate objectives and sustainability policies. The information collated will feed into the Baku Regional Planning Process and determines developed strategies for urban development. The study aims to improve the functional and physical structure of settlements by proposing an Urban Sustainable Development Model (USDM). An examination of the current design practice showed that there is a lack of systematic evaluation and revitalisation methods. Hence, the main objective of the proposed USDM is to evaluate existing settlement environments and requalify them with respect to an inclusive approach. The study concludes by highlighting the importance of USDM from two points of view: (1) importance of a systematic evaluation approach to effectively deal with the challenge of requalifying the settlement environments and (2) the designer’s key role during the revitalisation process. In this paper, the methodology of the research and initial fi ndings related to satisfaction with settlement and neighbourhood will be presented.