In recent years, the globalization process in the world and in Turkey has brought about a rapid urban development and transformation process. In spite of positive impacts of the aforementioned transformation, flawed policies has produced unplanned cities with no identity and unhealthy environments. As a consequence these cities can’t meet the physical, socio-cultural and physiological needs of their inhabitants. Due to widespread awareness caused by the negative impact of these unfit living environments, sustainability has become a subject of interest on various platforms. The tendency to think that the complex interrelations between human groups, their habitat and global environment are becoming a great threat for sustainability, has caused the studies about the subject to focus on environmental dimensions of the problem. However, the often-neglected socio-cultural dimensions of sustainability underline the fact that the fundamental alterations in social and economic organizations in response to the changing environmental needs are prerequisites of ecological sustainability. In the light of these findings, the scarcity of studies about socio-cultural dimensions of sustainability has been determined as a significant deficiency and identified as the concern of this paper. The conceptual framework of “sustainable urban developmentculturehousing areas interaction system” has been developed in order to systematically study sustainable urban development with a socio-cultural approach in housing areas. Components of the conceptual framework have been set with an integral approach and the interaction among them has been examined from a transactional perspective. Following this initial step, a model, has been developed in order to establish the means of how sustainable urban development in housing areas can be achieved in socio-cultural context: this model is to be applied in Bursa. With the aid of the model anchored in the conceptual framework, the transactional interrelations of the concepts of the interaction system and the role of these interrelations for the achievement of sustainable urban development will be determined. The aim of the model is to identify strategies for the achievement of sustainable urban development in the selected housing area of Bursa. The paper consists of five sections with a brief introduction about the reasons of preference of the topic. An analysis of the literature covering the definitions of and the theoretical and empirical studies about “sustainability”, “sustainable development”, “sustainable urban development” and” housing areas” is included in this section . In the second section, the key concepts are systematized and the “sustainable urban development – culturehousing areas interaction system” is laid down as the conceptual framework. The conceptual framework consists of three components: “sustainable urban development” with subcomponents of physical and socio-cultural requirements;” culture” with subcomponents of city culture and culture of sustainability ;”housing areas” with physical, sociocultural and physiological subcomponents. This interaction system expresses the relations of sustainable urban development and housing environments in the socio-cultural context. The third section includes a model developed for Bursa, based upon the conceptual framework. Initially, the causes of selecting Bursa to develop a model for, is described by giving information about physical, socio-economic and historical features of Bursa; together with the explanation of the development process of urban housing and the studies about sustainability in Bursa. The model, consisting of a conceptual and a practical part; includes three application steps developed with the “scenario writing” method. These steps are respectively; determination of the goals, identification of the paths to attain the goals, and feasibility analysis of the identified paths. The fourth section covers a case study applied in a traditional housing area in Bursa. Firstly, brief information about the case study area is given. Then implementation of the steps of the model is described. At the end of this section, the outcomes of the analysis of data are explained. In the last section, strategies have been developed, for sustainable urban development of the area in a socio-cultural context. The extent to which the aims of the study are achieved is also discussed in this section.