Development of urban hierarchies at the country and regional levels in Turkey

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the hierarchical distribution of different city size groups at the country and regional level between 1945 and 2015 in Turkey. During this period, previous studies have illustrated that human mobility played an important role for the physical and socio-economic transformation of cities and regions. At the country level, first, while the growth rate of the number of smaller cities was higher than the others, the growth rate of population was the highest in the large cities. However, later, despite the population increase, the number of small cities was decreased due to transformation of economy from rural to industrial. During the post-modern era, globalization contributed even further the growth of large cities. As a result, hierarchical distribution of different size cities according to regions reveals the wide gap with respect to urbanization between the East and the West of the country. While the metropolitan cities are over urbanized in the urban hierarchy due to globalization, some of the regions in the East do not have large cities due to lack of economic development and higher out-migration rate. Mobility of capital and the people from the East to the West do not allow the full-fledged development of the urban hierarchy in the Black Sea and the East Anatolia Regions. This results in shortage of jobs and thus it becomes a vicious cycle for underdevelopment.