Examining Urbanization Dynamics in Turkey Using DMSP–OLS and Socio-Economic Data

Abstract

The present study tried to determine the spatial expansion of urban areas in all the cities in Turkey and to examine the relationship between this spatial expansion with the related demographic, employment, educational, industrial and other indicators using the Geographical Information Systems. The present study was made up of three parts. In the first part, the urban areas in Turkey were determined using the pixel-based image classification methods. In the second part, the development levels of the cities, one of socio-economic indicators, were determined using the Principle Components Analysis. In the last part, statistical analyses were conducted to examine the relationship between the development levels of cities and urban areas. The results obtained revealed that the cities with larger urban area were more in the western part of the country and while those with less urban area were in the eastern part of the country. A similar distribution was also true for the socio-economic development order. The Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.711 between these variables demonstrated that there was a linear positive correlation in between. According to the results of Moran’s I spatial auto-correlation analysis, the distribution of both urban area and socio-economic development throughout the country had a relationship with place. According to geographically weighted regression analysis, the demographic, education and health indicators had the biggest influence on urban area.