On the Way to Metropolitanization: Housing Clusters in Turkey

Abstract

An increasing number of housing clusters have emerged because of the reconstitution of Turkish metropolitan municipalities, supported by the arrangements made in land development plans. Turkish metropolitans are determined by the administrative borders, while the world metropolitans are determined by their functional urban areas. Here, we aimed to evaluate the clustering capacity of metropolitan municipalities by focusing on the distribution of the residential occupation permits. Exploratory spatial data analysis was used to determine the core provinces of housing. The Moran Index was used to investigate the increase of clusters and this was cross-checked with the Spatial Lag results. We improved the recent land-use changes from rural plots to urban service parcels over the presence of the land development plans, including the transactions. Across the limited period studied, grifted patterns appeared. Clustering provinces enhanced the detection of construction that boosted urban development. Furthermore, a meshwork was revealed. In most developing countries, finding diverse and not tempered data sets in official sources is still a big problem. Moreover, open-data sources were limited in this study. In the search to prove uncontrolled urban growth fueled by construction activities, our research established an alternative way to read the metropolitan area network using occupancy permits, where the lack of data cannot be compensated.