Özet:

With rapid population growth and technology, the number of people living in cities is increasing day by day all around the world. Rising urbanization movements gradually increase the pressure on natural resources, causing the cities to spread uncontrollably and in an unplanned manner in space. Urban sprawl leads to many environmental, social and economic problems. This study aims to determine the areas where urban sprawl is low and high in the cities with metropolitan municipalities in Turkey. To this end, the 2012 data of the urban atlas database created by the European Environment Agency were used. The urban atlas provides a detailed land cover/use data set for the cities with population over 100 thousand people in the European Union member and candidate countries. Twenty different classes are defined for urban areas in the database. In this study, six of the classes that define urban texture were used as the main variable in determining urban sprawl density. Population size of the cities was used as another variable, and by examining the patch sizes of the urban texture classes, one of the spatial metrics, the density of sprawl and the areas where it is high were revealed. This study revealed a significant relationship between urban sprawl and population size. It was observed that in cities where the establishment of the metropolitan municipality organization dates back to older times, urban sprawl was more intense. It was also found that land classes with high urban density are generally located in city centers or close to centers, and these lands cover more areas in large metropolitan cities.

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