The Impact of Urban Form on Housing Prices in Istanbul

Istanbul is the largest city of Turkey and has a very rich urban form due to its historical and socio-economic background, technological developments and also natural amenities. The purpose of the study is to investigate the impact of urban form on housing prices since housing price is a function of internal and external characteristics such as urban form. The review of the literature illustrates that there are very few studies which investigate the impact of urban form on housing prices at the international level and they are mostly concentrated on developed countries. Thus, this paper is the first which deals with the same subject in the developing countries.In this study, hedonic price analysis is used as the research method. Several internal and external variables are taken into consideration. Typically, these external factors are grouped together under a ëlocationí variable. In the analysis, location variable is expressed as distance to the seashore, distance to the central business district and also distance to the sub-centre. In addition, building density, road surface ratio, population density, average urban block area, development index and housing prices are taken as the other variables of the analysis. According to the results of the study, the most important factors are the distance to the CBD and the building density of the establishments. As a conclusion, the results illustrates that form of the establishments has an important impact on the housing values and it is a crucial subject for the urban designers, urban planners, developers and policy makers.