Advisor: Dr. Ahmad Al-Zoabi

Abstract:
Making the world¹s villages. Towns and cities environmentally, economically, and socially sustainable is humanity¹s most urgent challenge for the 21st century. This issue has been the focus of many researchers and several studies have been carried out in order to find the closest city form to the ethos of sustainability. Efficiency is one of the main key issues closely related to the sustainable city agenda. Since the concept of sustainable city is highly contextual, this research is concerned with the investigation of the applicability of sustainable city paradigm, in terms of efficiency, to Arabic-Islamic cities in general and Jerusalem in particular. Investigation is limited to one major theoretical area, city form, and two minor theoretical areas, street systems and land use.
In order to carry out the investigation the research used different methods (multi-method approach) consisting of content analysis and field survey, thus it incorporated between method triangulation in data analysis. The use of different methods was inspired by the nature of the data collected and the local context of Jerusalem. Also the adoption of different method compensated for the limited sources of data and allowed gaining the strength of each method.
The finding reveals that most of the criteria and indicators of efficiency are applicable to the old city of Jerusalem in terms of city form and street system but that was not the case for land use. Thus, this does not indicate the validity of those criteria and indicators; on the contrary it urges further research since they are disputable. This research provides a flexible framework that respects the individuality of each city to work through to approach its own vision of sustainability.