Urban conservation has recently been held to possess a wide perspective for explicitly identifying and assessing the combination of tangible and intangible values of historic urban contexts and implicitly defining and conserving authenticity, local identity and spirit of place through the developments in assessment of values. Nevertheless, this new way of understanding and appreciating historic urban context brings new questions into the urban conservation discipline. Discourses focus on the importance of developing reliable sources for investigating authenticity, identity and spirit of place in historic urban contexts. This paper outlines a theoretical approach to the spirit of place and proposes a new source; property rights as contribution to the theory and practice of identifying and conserving the spirit of place through exploring the human experiences and the way of forming, designing and constructing the urban form.

With the rapid development of real estate markets under globalization and exponential competitive market conditions, risk evaluation has been one of the most important tasks in the process of real estate investment valuation. This paper describes the relationship between construction permit uncertainties and real estate development projects by using the Decision Tree Analysis (DTA) approach. Expected Value (EV) criterion for an office development project proposed and incorporated into conventional Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) analysis which are determined by DTA. This will help utility function to come closer to the real world, so that decision making and risk analysis can be done based on the real and possible data providing better conditions for investors. The results are consistent with the results calculated by conventional DCF analysis. However research demonstrates that is of application DTA obviate the deficiencies of conventional DCF analysis under construction permit delays and scheduling uncertainties. Results also emphasize the importance of applying EV and DTA for the construction permit delays generate a significant change in NPV of real estate development projects.

Increasing of world population in recent decades and developing technology, have led to rapid urbanization. In this process, the expansion of urban areas have caused many environmental problems. Also, cities create air, water and soil pollution. As well as urban sprawl have started to put pressure on forests, water resources, natural landscapes and agricultural fields that surrounds urban areas. This pressure also affect agricultural land which is essential for human survival and is the main economic activity. Loss of productive agricultural lands have economic and ecological consequences and the loss of fertile lands reduce countries/cities’ capacity to feed itself and made them dependent.
The aim of the study, exhibit the loss of agricultural lands and determined to present information about this subject. The case area is Konya, where has been growing rapidly and urban area has expanded in great measure after 1950s. Also, Konya is located on fertile agricultural lands and agriculture is an important economic sector in Konya. Whereas, after 1970’s a large amount of agricultural land, approximately 15,000 hectares, have been urbanized because of urban sprawl. During this period, fertile agricultural lands especially in the southern and western part of the city have been urbanized. After 1960 development plans aimed to protect agricultural lands, but enough success has not achieved due to lack of economic solutions.

Keywords: Urban Sprawl, Agricultural Land, Konya.

The beginning findings of the research project, titled “Enhancing Logistics Sector As a Tool in Order to Improve the Competitiveness of Large Scale Manufacturing Industry in Kayseri” that is supported by Yıldız Technical University Scientific Research Project Coordination Department, are being stated in this research brief. The missions of this article are to evaluate the “entrepreneurship” as being one of the regional competition factor to specify the manufacturing industry entrepreneurs in Kayseri and to determine the typology of the mentioned entrepreneurs. In accordance with this purpose, field research had been realised within 32 large industrial firms in Kayseri of which had achieved to be ranked in top 1000 industrial enterprises between 2010-2012 ones at least. As regards to the beginning findings, the evaluated entrepreneur profile in Kayseri could predominantly be accepted as “craftsman” entrepreneurs. The basic characteristics of this type of entrepreneurs are as following: kneaded with business life even from early ages, therefore limited education opportunities, generally lack of experience as professional in any other firms, adopt inflexible management style, prefer restricted expansion with regard to products and equipments. In addition, remaining distant to diversify financial tools and correspondingly avoiding to take risk in uncertainty circumstances and utilizing the opportunities in long term are the characteristic of craftsman entrepreneurs.

The aim of the paper is to understand the spatial structure of development in Turkey in the context of socio-economic components and environmental change and to exhibit the interaction between these variables. Accordingly, using factor analysis and k-means cluster analysis with the contribution of environmental, social and economic indicators, different geographical patterns are revealed in Turkey and the interaction between natural degradation and socio-economic structure are examined with the index of SES components in resulting sub-regions. Based on research findings, the power of economic and human capital decline relatively in developed metropolitan areas, on the contrary in developing and underdeveloped regions development rate are increasing faster than metropolitan areas. From this determination it’s possible to obtain three results: (1) it’s impossible to mention sustainability in metropolitan areas if the pressure trend of development will proceed in environment and natural resources, (2) continuity of growth trend with the contribution of institutional, social and physical capital in developing regions will enhance the potential of sustainable development, (3) in tourism cities, although the decrease in resource consumption growth rate and development in economic and human capital, the deterioration of natural resources that are the basis of tourism activities expose risks for the balanced growth in tourism cities.