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FUTURE OF TURKISH CITIES: NEW URBAN PATTERNS IN EUROPEAN
UNION?
Contents:
1.
Introduction
1.A .
1.B.
2.
2.A.
2.B.
2.C.
2.C.1
2.C.2.
2.C.3.
2.D.
3.
3.A.
Basic Issues in Turkey’s Joining European Union
Turkey
Urbanization Transition In Turkey
Urbanization Transition
Urbanization in Turkey
Factors Shaping Urbanization Pattern in Turkey
Economic Structure of the Country
Regional Disparities
National Urbanization and Regional Development Strategies
Future of Turkish Urban Pattern
Urbanization Transition in European Union
Urbanization Patterns Among Members with respect to Factors Shaping these
Patterns.
Comparison between Turkey and Other Members
Conclusion
Suggestions on the Implications on Urbanization if Turkey Joins the European
Union and When It Should Join
3.B.
4.
4.A.
Introduction
Having land in Europe, the government of Turkey has been longing for joining the European
Union since 1963 when it was accepted as an associate candidate. Now, in 1998 Turkey is still
not a member, indeed it has been degraded to be considered in a special category, as the 12th
applicant country.
The intention of this paper is not to suggest why Turkey is not being considered for full
membership or what it should do to be considered for full membership. It will examine the
urbanization transition in Turkey and will suggest the future for Turkish cities and whether
joining the European Union would make any changes in this transition.
In order to be able to make such a suggestion on implications, examining the urbanization
transitions not only in Turkey but among the member countries is necessary as well. I will also
give a picture of the factors shaping such an urban pattern. Given the broadness and the intricacy
of the topic, I suggest that it needs to be further investigated.
Basic Issues in Turkey's Joining European Union
As was mentioned earlier, Turkey is not a full member of the European Union. The main issues
sited in this fact are the conflicts with another member state (Greece), not having a
full-functioning democracy, and violation of human rights. These issues are basically political.
However, there are other issues not as frequently sited or sited at all. These are mainly in
the social and economic arenas. Turkey is a less developed country compared to the
current members, displaying various characteristics of developing countries such as high
population and urbanization rates, unstable economy with a low gross national product
and gross domestic product per capita. Some member states do not want to disturb the
balance of the Union by allowing in a less developed country which could cause high
migration rates among the members and less stability among the current ones (Yalev
1998).
The facts on the Turkish economy and demography will be presented in the following
sections. A comparison between Turkey and European Community members will also be
available. However, the political issues sited as primary cause for not being admitted to
the European Union are not going to be discussed in this paper.
Turkey
Turkey is a very strategically located country with very apparent differences among the
geographical regions. It is surrounded by the Black Sea on the north; Romania, Bulgaria,
and the Aegean Sea on the west; the Mediterranean Sea, Syria, and Iraq on the south,
Iran, Azerbaijan, Armania, and Georgia on the east. With such a location, it is a unique
country. It is many things: European, Asian, Middle Eastern, Balkan East European, and
Mediterranean.
The country has 774,000 square kilometers of land and is divided into seven
geographical regions. There are clear physical differences among these regions. The
eastern and the northeastern parts of the country are very hilly, not providing a good
basis for infrastructure and transportation network. This geographical disadvantage
clearly shows itself in the development pattern in Turkey.
In addition to the mentioned differences, there are disparities in the socio-economic
aspects among the regions. The eastern and southeastern regions comprised 3 % of the
national industry in 1975, whereas Istanbul, by itself accommodated 49%. There is also
difference in the urbanization levels within the country which will be discussed later.
Urbanization Transition in
Turkey
In order to be able to define the urbanization transition in Turkey, I would like to talk
about urbanization transition in general, particularly in developing countries.
Urbanization Transition
As Drake suggests, urbanization transition is a visible and dramatic member of the
family of transitions1. It is almost parallel with industrialization and exhibits itself clearly
with the level of industrialization, which is seen as economic development in general.
Most industrialized, in other words, developed countries, have reached high levels of
urbanization and the developing or underdeveloped countries are experiencing
urbanization. This does not necessarily mean that less developed countries have lower
rates of urbanization than the developed countries because there are several countries
that have as high rates, such as Brazil with an urbanization rate reaching 75% (Jones and
Visaria, 1997).
When examining the rates of urbanization, it is very important to look into the growth of
the population in urban areas and more importantly to the rising share of the total
population in urban areas. The latter signifies other factors than natural increase in urban
population, namely rural-urban migration. There are various reasons for the rural-urban
migration, in other words, rural push urban pull.
The population in the rural areas does not have the same kind of opportunities as the
population in urban areas. In rural areas, there are not many job opportunities (especially
with decline in agricultural land and employment), good education and healthcare
facilities, namely better quality of life and future for the households, as can be found in
urban areas. On the other hand, whether the migrant population in the urban areas obtain
the level of living they fantasize about is questionable. Another major factor in
migration to the urban areas is the social connections that the migrants have in the cities.
A significant ratio of the migrants usually have a family member or friend who have
migrated to the city they leave their rural homes for.
1
Brechin, Drake, Ness, cd. (1992) p.325
Jones and Visaria argue that besides the growth of urban population; growth of large
metropolises and urban primacy; problems of providing minimal urban infrastructure;
issues in rural-urban labor transfer and employment; and the linkages between
urbanization and regional development issues are among the general interest and concern
with issues of urbanization in developing countries2
Drake suggests that urbanization transition is characterized by early stages in which there
is rapid growth of urban population, and later stages, where decline in this growth can be
observed3. Although developing countries are expected to observe the earlier stages and
likewise, the developed countries are expected to observe the later stages or urbanization
transition, I would like to stress that the levels among different countries will vary
significantly.
In my opinion, there is a very important issue in this transition, mainly in the definition.
What is urban? Is it an administrative term, or an area where the majority of the labor
force is employed in formal urban sectors not in rural or agricultural sector, a population
density of certain number of people, an area with various urban facilities, or is it simply a
number of people? Assuming that it is a number, what is that number?
I believe that the transitions observed in different countries are very dependent or rather
biased on this number. For example, this number in Turkey (although the main criteria
is based on administrative status as will be discussed in the following section) is 10,000
people. On the other hand, the urban definition requires a population of 20,000 people in
Brazil and Indonesia, 5,000 people (besides other factors) in India and 2,000 people in
China (Jones and Visaria, 1997). If some of these countries changed the size
requirement to be classified as urban, we could observe much different levels of
urbanization. In such a scenario, India would have been observing a much lower rate
than 27% of 1991 and on the contrary, Brazil a higher rate than almost 75%.
There is also the question of edge cities, existing particularly in developed countries.
These can simply be defined as economically self-sufficient settlements distant from
central cities. If we just take into account the number of persons living in the edge cities,
it is likely that these settlements may not be able to step the treshold to be categorized as
urban although there may be no rural character within these.
However, there are examples for non-number related definitions. In Chinese case, the
sudden jump of the level of urbanization from 23.5% in 1983 to 49.3% in 1988 is
attributable to the change in the definition of "urban" in 1984 from an administrative
perspective4.
Another point that I would like to make is that while examining the urbanization
transition in developing and developed countries, we should not see that as an
2
Jones and Visaria, ed. (1997) p. 23
3
Brechin, Drake, Ness, ed. (1992) p. 325
4
Jones and Visaria, ed. (1997) p.54 in chapter 3 "The Effects of National Urban Strategy and Regional
Development Policy on Patterns of Urban Growth in China" by Aprodicio Laquian.
independent transition. Rather, the roots of this transition can be traced in mainly the
demographic, technological, and industrialization transitions. Moreover, the
consequences of the urbanization transition can be observed in toxicity, epidemiological,
and fossil fuel transitions. Therefore, it should be seen as a member of closely knit
transitions.
Urbanization in Turkey
As is expected from a developing Country, there is a high rate of urbanization in Turkey.
The transition can be traced down to the earlier years of the republic. Turkish Republic
was founded in 1923 and Ankara was established as the capital city. Before the
Republic, Istanbul served as the capital for the Ottoman Empire. With the establishment
of the republic, Turkey started experiencing new stages of transitions in different
members. The basic cause was the goal "modernization" which led to a major
transformation in particularly agricultural, industrial, technological, and educational
transitions as well as urbanization.
Table ** displays the population of Turkey with a breakdown of urban and rural
population since 1927. Urban definition comes from an administrative point, indicating
the incorporated areas of a city or a town.
It is interesting to see that in 70 years, the urbanization level has quadrupled throughout
the country. The growth has been higher since 1950, particularly since 1960 which also
corresponds to the beginning of the five-year development plans which will be discussed
later. During the last almost four decades, the urban population growth rate has been
higher than 1 % annually. Graph indicates that the urban population has been growing
almost steadily.
In order to be able to define the underlying causes of this pattern, we should examine
other factors, such as the demography and the economic structure as well as the
development plans.
In graph **, we can see that the total population has been growing almost steadily as well
and almost parallel to the urban population. Until 1980s, the rural population also grew
but with a much less significant rate than the urban population. However, since 1980s, it
has been declining. I believe this is mostly due to rural-urban migration, not due to
natural decline of population growth. Although, there have been extensive efforts in
family planning, especially in the eastern regions and rural areas, I presume that the 5
fertility rate is still higher in rural than in urban areas5.
Turkey exhibits another characteristic of urban pattern in developing countries: the
existence of a primate city. Istanbul is the largest city in terms of population as well as the
most viable in terms of economics (table **). It has 8.3 million people as of 1997 and is
still growing. Ankara, the second most populous city only has 35% of what Istanbul has.
Istanbul, actually, is a mega-city covering the land between Tekirdag and Kocaeli.
5
The author does not have any data on Turkey to prove this point at this time.
Another characteristic is seen in the distribution of the urban population by city size in
Table **. The share of larger cities have inclined over the past decades and reached
almost two-thirds of the entire urban population by 1980. Unfortunately, the data is not
available for more recent years. However, currently, there are five cities, Istanbul,
Ankara, Izmir, Adana, and Bursa that have over I million people living in their central
cities.
As expected from a developing country, urbanization has not declined or come to
stability. In other words, Turkey has been observing the early stages of the urbanization
transition, it has not reached the later stages yet. However, having a 65% urbanization
level, Turkey promises to reach the later stages in the near future. One of the objectives
of my paper is to create a model to estimate the future of the urbanization transition and
suggest when it will reach the later stages. I will be using Stella for that and am planning
to incorporate the demographic and economic structure as well. It still needs more data
and more thinking.
2.C.1. Economic Structure of the Country
The economy of Turkey has been changing basically since 1950s as was discussed under
the “modernization” policy of Turkey. During the 1950s, the most important economic
goal was to promote industrialization as well as modernization of agricultural techniques.
Although there is no data on Gross Domestic Product by sectors as early as 1950 in Table
**, Table ** demonstrates that indeed, before 1950, the labor force employed in the
industry sector was only 7%. Since than, both industry and service sectors have been
attracting labor force from agriculture which has last 33% labor force between 1950 and
1990.
Gross Domestic Product exhibits similar results. The share of the agricultural sector has
been decreasing since 1970s and has observed the most severe decrease between 1975 and
1985. After 1985, the rate of the decrease of the share has been at a slower rate. I am not
sure if this could indicate a transition and that it is reaching stability. I will have to
investigate. The service and the industry sectors are experiencing increasing share of the
GDP. Service is the leading sector in the country and has experienced a higher rate of
increase than industry. The changes starting 1980s are attributable to the “market
economy” introduced during these years.
The increasing share of industry in the national economy usually lead to increases in the
gross national product as well as the gross domestic product. In the case of Turkey,
although the GNP increased from 12 million US$ to 128 million US$, increasing more
than ten times, and although GDP increased from 17 million US$ to 151 million US$,
between 1970 and 1995, GDP per capita and GNP per capita increased much less (Tables
** and **). This is mainly an outcome of high rates of population growth.
The tables also show that Turkey always had lower GDP per capita and GNP per capita
than the world’s average. However, if the graphs are examined, we can easily see a
pattern. Although these indicators in Turkey were not much lower than the world between
1970 and 1975 (in the case of GNP, until 1980), the difference gets wider afterwards. This
I believe can be explained by increase of the population in Turkey as well.
When we look back at the urbanization of the nation, we see a close link with the
industrialization process as is expected. It is very difficult to establish a relationship
between the distribution of the labor force or the gross domestic product and urbanization.
Nevertheless, a numerical relation exists in this case, although it may not be significant.
Between 1950 and 1990, the nation gained almost 34% labor force in industry and service,
and the percentage of urban population increased by 37% (Table **).
Regional Disparities
There is an evident regional disparity in Turkey in geographic, demographic, and
economic structure. This is also reflected in the urbanization level between the regions.
The country is basically divided into seven regions (map **).
The differences in the demographic and the urbanization areas can be observed in tables
** and **. The eastern regions including Black Sea, hold 30% of the population, where
as Marmara region only houses 26% of the total population. However, there is a trend of
decrease in population in Marmara region. There are several factors contributing to the
decrease including the high cost of living, different economic incentives provided in
other regions, and the over-crowdedness and all the ills associated with it.
When the regions are compared over time, there is only one region that has been steadily
gaining population, Southeastern Anatolia region. This captures attention because, there
are two important issues about Southeastern region. One of them is the ongoing
terrorism from the Kurds which I believe is a major cause for population loss, including
deaths and migration to other regions. Another issue is the high fertility rates in the
region. While the fertility rate is 3.4 throughout the nation, is 5.7 in the region (DSI,
1998).
The other issue is the Guneydogu Anadolu Projesi (GAP standing for Southeastern
Anatolia Project), a major development project covering 75,000square kilometers of
Upper Mesopotamia covering Tigris and Euphrates river basins. It includes the cities of
Adiyaman, Batman, Diyarbakir, Gaziantep, Kilis, Mardin, Snrt, Sanliurfa, and Simak.
The project aims to irrigate the and land which encompasses 20% of the fertile land in
the country which would lead to a very significant level of economic and community
development since most of the population resides in rural areas and could be employed
in agriculture. In addition, the project aims to produce energy. It is very early to analyze
the data about whether the development project has reached its goals.
Examining the urban population ratios, the difference is clear again. Although
urbanization in each region has been increasing, the western regions are much more
urbanized than the eastern regions. Historically, the western regions have always had
higher rates or urbanization than the national average (except in one case, in 1960
Central Anatolia had 0.4% lower rate than the nation) and the eastern regions have had
lower rates than the nation.
National Urbanization and Regional Development
Strategies
National urbanization policies are mainly found in the five-year development plans that
are prepared by the State Planning Organization. The key elements will be discussed as
follows based on Keles's book on Urbanization Policy, 1990.
The first five-year plan corresponds to the 1963-67 period. Although the first five-year
plan does not particularly address the issue of urbanization, this is a very important issue
in the second five-year plan. According to that, large cities were seen essential for
economic development, therefore, a lot of investments were made under the name of
"growth poles" in Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, and Adana. In the third plan, it was apparent
that the investments to the growth poles in the western region accelerated regional
imbalance. For this reason, an organization was formed to help the distressed areas. The
more recent five-year plans have realized that urbanization will still take place,
eventually at a lower rate and have incorporated the importance of urban problems such
as infrastructure, services, and housing. It is not until the sixth plan (1990-94) that urban
environmental issues have taken place in the national urbanization and development
strategies.
2.D. Future of Turkish Urban Pattern
Here I am planning the construct a Stella model to show when Turkey could reach stability
in terms of urbanization. Although I have not made any attempts yet, I have a big concern.
This concern lies in the current rate of urbanization, in 1990-97, the annual rate of
urbanization was 1.26% which is higher than the rate of 1.08% during 1980-90. Therefore,
even though Turkey has reached almost a high level of urbanization, it is continuing with a
rapid rate still. I know I have to look into crude birth and death rates, etc. but I would like
to have an idea whether I could assume a ceiling level for urbanization for Turkey. I know
it cannot be close to 100% or even 90% with the agricultural economy and the GAP project
which will probably have an inverse effect on rural-urban migration and the decline of
agriculture in the nation’s economy.
I will need a lot of help with this section!
3. Urbanization Transition in European Union
After the investigation of the Turkish case, I can conclude that examination of the
urbanization transition in EU is not very easy to accomplish. In order to define
urbanization transition, many factors need to be incorporated for each country. This is
even more difficult when there is not a very dependable data source (world resource
database had some discrepancies with the State Statistical Institute database in the Turkish
case) and not much expertise on the countries.
Despite all these disadvantages, I looked into the urbanization rates and some other
indicators in the European Union. The analyses below are very general and are not very
conclusive.
3.A. Urbanization Patterns in the European Union and the Factors Shaping these
Patterns
Before examining the pattern, I would like to caution the reader about a point I have made
earlier; the definition of urban may change from one country to the other. For the purpose
of simplicity, the definition is assumed to be unique throughout the Union.
In this examination, 12 countries were taken. These were chosen according to the date of
their acceptance as members: Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, West
Germany6 (1957), United Kingdom, Denmark, Ireland (1973), Greece (1981), Portugal,
and Spain (1986).
As seen in the Graph **, almost all the European Union members are in the later stage of
the urbanization transition. All of the members except for Portugal have exceeded 55% of
urbanization levels, among which, some are very highly urbanized, such as Germany,
Denmark, Netherlands, United Kingdom, and Belgium (reaching (96%).
One of the main questions of this paper was to answer whether joining the European
Community had any impacts on the urbanization transition of the members. By looking at
this graph, we can see no correlation. However, this issue needs to be examined in more
detail for a better conclusion.
The population graph (**) has a lot of similarities with the urbanization graph. Here, we
can see that almost every country in the European Community has reached stability or will
reach in the very near future.
Graph ** shows the percentage of population living in cities of at least 750,000 population.
The sudden jump in Ireland’s case can be explained by Graph ** which indicated the
number of cities of the same size. This is valid for other cases like Greece as well.
In the beginning of the paper, I had discussed that urbanization is seen parallel with
industrialization. If industrialization and Gross National Product per Capita are take as
indicators of economic development, then we should expect that in countries with high
levels of industrialization and GNP per capita there will be high levels of urbanization. In
order to illustrate this analysis, Tables ** and ** and Graph ** were created based on 1990
data.
6
The case for Germany is particularly difficult because some data is broken down into West and East
Germany, whereas some data is for the entire country. In addition, some data is not available at all.
Therefore, for most cases, Germany should not be a decisive factor.
Although a clusteration can be traced in the relation between GNP per capita and
urbanization, there are few exceptions and that suggests that the relationship is not a
perfect linear regression.
However, as was mentioned earlier, there is a real danger in comparisons among different
countries on their urbanization levels. The data provided by the United Nations (1992)
shows that the definition or urban changed among the countries. Although the most
common definition for urban is “having at least 10,000 inhabitants”, this is not the case for
some. For example, in Belgium, in Denmark, and in United Kingdom the definition of
urban is not about the size of the population. On the other hand, “urban population” has to
be greater than 2,000 in France, Germany, Luxembourg, and Netherlands and 1,500 people
are enough to make an urban settlement in Ireland.
With the light of these numbers the table ** needs to revised. Nevertheless, this is an
infeasible task. Since it is impossible to know the number of people who could be living in
urban areas with the same definition for urban without a real census, table ** attempts to
show possible shifts of the urbanization levels that were shown in the previous table in the
case the definition required at least 10,000 inhabitants7.
In addition, when the primacy figures are examined, there is not a strong relation with the
level of urbanization and primacy. It should be noted that these figures are based on the
United Nations’ estimates and that data for some of the countries investigated in this paper
are missing. These figures can be found in table **.
When the distribution of GDP in different sectors, particularly in industry is examined, it is
a different result. Although data for four countries is missing, the two (Spain and Greece)
of the three countries with the highest share of industry in GDP are among the lower
cluster of urbanization and GNP per capita graph. However, if the lowest shares of
agriculture are taken instead of industry, we get a much different picture. Here the three
countries with the lowest shares of agriculture (Luxembourg, Belgium, and United
Kingdom), these are also the first, second, and fourth most urbanized countries in this
selection. The notion that whether agricultural share of GPD can be an indicator of the
level of urbanization and it could be used in forecasting the future of urbanization need to
be examined in more detail.
There is a predominant urban pattern among the members of the European Union. This
pattern is a result of urbanization, suburbanization, deurbanization, and reurbanization
(Commission of the European Communiites, Van den Berg et.al).
Here, I will also discuss the issues like primacy, suburbanization, living conditions in the
cities, and maybe others.
7
The cases for Belgium, Denmark, and United Kingdom are assumed to be stable since we do not have a
number in their definition as a starting point.
3.B. Comparison of Turkey and the European Community Countries
Although the previous section is not complete and that I cannot make a comparison in
different areas, I would briefly like to mention that Turkey exhibits major differences
between the members of the European Community.
The differences are especially apparent in the rapid increase of the total and the urban
population, increase of population in large cities, and the very low level of GNP per capita.
In addition, the growth pattern of the cities is very different.
Although there are some indications that suburbanization is the new trend in large cities in
Turkey, the pattern of this process is different. In Turkey, the suburbs are basically high
rise, high density areas, not showing a lot of similiarities with the other countries. We can
suggest that because of this suburbanization, Turkey may experience the pattern of
deurbanization and reurbanization like the other countries in the future. However, such a
conclusion would not have a strong ground due to the high migration rate to the large cities
in Turkey. Although, there might be a low rate of deurbanization (as seen in the case of
Ankara), there will be a very high demand for housing, particularly in the city center to
have easy transportation access.
Another comparison can be made in the primacy issue. Although primacy is a
characteristic of developing countries, this analysis showed that developed countries may
experience primacy as well, just like the case of France, and Denmark ***.
This section will be much more detailed.
Reference:
Brechin, Drake, Ness, ed., 1993. Population-Environment Dynamics, University of
Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Commission of the European Comunities, 1992. Urbanization and the Functions of Cities
in the European Community, Brussels.
Danielson, Michael N. and Rusen Keles, 1985. The Politics of Rapid Urbanization –
Government and Growth in Modern Turkey, Holmes and Meier Publishers, New York.
DSI, 1998. GAP (Southeastern Anatolia Project – Brochures obtained from GAP
Administration in Ankara, Turkey published by State Water Works).
Jones Gavin W. and Pravin Visaria, 1997. Urbanization in Large Developing Countries:
China, Indonesia, Brazil, and India, Claredon Press, Oxford.
Keles, Rusen, 1990. Kentlesme Politikasi [Urbanization Policy], Ozkan Matbaacilik,
Ankara.
Symposium on Turkey in Europe due to the 75th Anniversary of the Turkish Republic, Ann
Arbor, November 6, 1998, featuring Hayret Yalev (Consul General), Assoc. Prof. Muge
Gocek, Asst. Prof. Paul Kubicek.
United Nations, 1992. World Urbanization Prospects, United Nations, New York.
Van den Berg Leo, Drewett Roy, Klaassen Leo H., Rossi, Angelo, and Cornelis H.T.
Vijverberg, 1982. Urban Europe - A Study of Growth and Decline, Pergamon Press,
Oxford.
World Resource Institute: World Resource Database
World wide web: www.die.gov.tr
World wide web: www.infra.gov.tr