Decentralized Urbanization Policies And Regional Development: Experience Of Turkey

Today, while the dynamics of globalization are observed in almost every area of life, some changes; which are sometimes in the opposite and sometimes the same direction, but somehow interrelated; are faced. In that process, approaches some approaches seeing centralized policies and structures inadequate for solving some of the problems except for certain areas, have begun to come up. The proportional change on the urban and rural population that was created by the immigrations, which have gone along with the industrialization, has consistently improved in favour of the city, and eventually has paved the way for negative consequences such as the clutter of that population on some specific points.Some countries, which adopted liberal policies, have refused to interfere with the natural development of the urbanization process and have expected such rapid urbanization to reach equilibrium after a period. However, that rapid urbanization, which is limited to certain centres and leads to regional and urban imbalances, has pushed many counties to take various measures and to create new policies for struggling against it. First, some efforts were made for improving the living conditions of rural areas and creating new opportunities in order to stop migration that is the main reason for this and to keep the rural population in their villages and even to bring the immigrants back. Some countries have had the expectation of benefits for the development of the whole country, from directing the population to some major city centres. That ultimately has led to certain social and cultural problems. On the other hand, for eliminating those social, cultural and economical problems, some countries have applied decentralized urbanization policies, which were expected to end the regional imbalances, by preventing the population and urbanization from being directed to some specific centres, in the aim of spreading that evenly throughout the country.In this study, first, the concepts of urbanization and regional development will be dealt. Urbanization policies that have been developed by scholars and been implemented in different countries, will be discussed. Strategies, which provide regional development taking the advantage of different policies and especially the investment policies, for eliminating disparities between regions, will be specified. Then, the idea of decentralization in urban and regional development will be focused. And in the last section, decentralised urbanization and regional development policies, which have been applied and are being applied in Turkey, will be discussed.