Abstract:

The fundamental economic restructuring driven by globalisation and the revolution in information and communication technology are the most important processes in our contemporary world. Many developed countries’ economies are shifting away from manufacturing toward finance, specialized services, and information processing while many developing or poor countries are industrializing rapidly. These changes are forcing countries and also cities to redefine their advantages in order to become more developed. In this way, countries’ urbanisation dynamics and city-systems also gain some differences in the course of time. This paper examines Turkey’s urbanisation and its contemporary city-system and urban hierarchical classification. In this case we study the Turkey’s demographic, economic, social and geographic features of urban population using census city-level data as published by the State Institute of Statistics. The analysis is relied on models and quantitative indices that are used in human geography, demography and urban sociology and are adapted according to the available material and urbanisation conditions prevailing in Turkey. One of the most important findings of this study is that the general urbanisation level depends mainly on the economic and social factors rather than the demographic factors

Keywords: