During the past quarter century, a number of scholars working in social sciences and planning have argued that quality of life has both a subjective dimension as well as an objective reality. Building on the seminal study of Campbell et al (1976) that measured people’s satisfactions, Marans and his colleagues began to explore quality of life issues from a conceptual and empirical perspective (Marans and Rodger, 1975; Lee and Marans,, 1980; Connerly and Marans, 1988, Marans, 2003). Their contention has been that quality of life in a particular geographic setting is a subjective phenomenon, and that each occupant of a setting may differ in his/her views about it. Furthermore, those views would reflect their assessments of a number of setting attributes that could be influenced by certain characteristics of the occupant. The model also suggests that the occupant’s assessments of setting attributes are associated with the attributes themselves. A major research program that utilizes this model in measuring the quality of community life has been launched in metro Detroit (Marans and Gocmen, 2005). As part of the research program, parallel studies are underway in several world cities including Istanbul. This paper presents findings from the Istanbul study on quality of urban life. The study was undertaken as part of the Istanbul Strategic Plan prepared by the Greater Istanbul Municipality (BIMTAS, Istanbul Metropolitan Planning Office) and partially supported by Istanbul Technical University Research Fund. The key purpose of the research was to provide useful information for developing planning/design strategies that will foster sustainable urbanization through enhancing quality of life, which is one of the most important principles of sustainable urbanization. Another purpose was to explore the impact of environmental, economic, social, physical and health related indicators on quality of life satisfaction among Istanbul residents. Ultimately, the research will provide recommendations which will further enhance the quality of life in Istanbul at a number of levels, from empowering communities at a local level to participate in the evolution of their neighborhoods to influencing institutional and corporate objectives and regional and national government sustainability policies. The research will ‘paint a picture’ of the quality of life in Istanbul, and establishes the foundation for further future research that examines change. The primary means of measuring quality of life was the questionnaire which closely followed the protocol of the Detroit Area Study (DAS) 2001. As research method questionnaire survey was applied to measure quality of life in Istanbul. The questionnaire framework opted for is closely related to that of the Detroit Area Study (DAS) 2001 model. The DAS model attempts to capture the reality of community quality of life by exploring both objective and subjective indicators based around domains, thus providing the research with a more rounded and complete profile of communities. The DAS research program is successfully ‘exported’ around the world. For example, the cities of Beijing (China), Belo Horizonte (Brazil), Brisbane (Australia) (Stimson, et al, 2007) and Cape Town (South Africa), are in the process of, or are considering fielding the core module of DAS. DAS therefore provides a useful medium for future comparisons with a number of global cities. Whilst fielding the core modules of the DAS study the Istanbul Area Study (IAS) also contains a number of additional questions that are region specific thus establishing a bespoke criterion which best captures the community profile of Istanbul and issues relating to the city. Housing and residential mobility, residential history, travel demand, transportation and public services, educational services, health and health care facilities, parks and recreation, shopping and entertainment, neighborhood and neighboring, community participation and involvement, safety issues, employment and journey to work, environmental and regional issues are explored in the survey. In total 1635 households across 423 points within the city were interviewed. The contribution to the overall Istanbul strategic plan was to identify regions and neighbourhoods profiles and to map accordingly, to identify satisfaction levels of communities and identify problematic areas for households and identify regions of preference and to provide data to contribute to the residential development strategy. In this paper the methodology and initial findings of the study is presented