Urban Growth, Spatial Change, Land Use, Housing and Population Relations: The Case of Ankara Province

Urban development and shaping of spaces are closely associated with a city’s economic activities and demographic characteristics. After the announcement of Ankara as the capital city in 1923, the size of the city was understood to be very insufficient and a new zoning plan was started to combat the inadequate housing assets and even cooperatives were established to accelerate housing construction for public officers. However, it is noteworthy that the development was too slow until the 1950s, after which date the urban scale grew rapidly due to the growing population and diversifying economic activities, new development areas turned to settlements, and naturally, natural vegetation was rapidly destroyed. Despite the increasing housing stock in the city, the demand for and prices of real estate in general, and particularly housing, are very high, which encourages allocation of new settlement areas as residential housing areas. A process, whereby an increased density in residential areas is provisioned with the new development plans made by the Municipalities, the Housing Development Administration, and the other public authorities, is experienced and with the urban transformation and renewal projects, the current housing stock is being swiftly renewed. In these circumstances, space use and spatial development in the city are managed based on revenue or economic rent rather than public policy and sustainability goals while fringe urban development also leads to increased infrastructure investment and local service costs.In this paper, the population, number of housing, and spatial development relationships in the 1923-2017 period were first dealt with based on macro data and the results of that study were analyzed in integration with remote sensing data and the man-made structures and the development in residential areas identified with satellite data were comparatively evaluated. ın the second stage, factors affecting the change in the total land assets in the province were examined with a regression model and it was established that the process of transformation of land to land lot was shaped by the impact of demographic factors. In order to regulate the use of space at the provincial and regional levels, there seems to be a requirement to primarily control the migration to the city; manage urban development based on public policies; restructure planning policies on equitable sharing of the economic rent created by planning activities in the city; and t