Turkey’s city regions didn’t wait for permission. They grew, intertwined, and sometimes outpaced the very maps meant to contain them

Reframing my research lens: From public administration to planning-inspired city-regional thinking.

In April 2025, I had the opportunity to share the core ideas of my postdoctoral research with a vibrant community of urban and regional planning scholars at the University of Amsterdam’s Urban Planning Group. This presentation brought together a wide range of perspectives and allowed for open, reflective engagement on my work. It also enabled me to reflect back on my PhD work, and think about my new research perspectives

In this blog, I will argue that Turkey’s current metropolitan governance system, based on rigid administrative boundaries, fails to reflect the real functional interdependencies and urban patterns that are emerging across multiple cities and regions. Early in my academic journey, I found myself drawn to a topic that few in Turkey were talking about at the time: city-regions. It was a concept just beginning to gain international attention, promising but still largely uncharted territory, especially in the context of Turkey’s evolving metropolitan reforms.

I vividly remember a conversation with my mentor, Professor Hüseyin Gül. We were discussing urban governance, and he casually brought up the idea of city-regions. His comment struck a chord. I was already questioning how to improve metropolitan systems in Turkey, and his remark framed those questions in a new and exciting way. He saw city-regions not just as a policy model, but as a framework to rethink how we organize space and power. He also warned me it wouldn’t be an easy path, and he was right. The literature was sparse, and applying the concept to the Turkish context raised more questions than answers. But that challenge only deepened my commitment. It felt like an opportunity to build something new, to shape a distinctive research agenda that would both push boundaries and stay grounded in real-world concerns.

Looking back, that early decision has been foundational. The city-regional perspective continues to inform both my academic work and my broader contributions to the field. What began as a spark in a hallway conversation became a compass for my scholarly life.

My visiting research project at UvA builds directly on my PhD dissertation, which laid the foundation for the research grant that supports my current stay as a visiting researcher. In Turkey, I observed the transformation of municipalities into Metropolitan Municipalities, a process that gradually conferred new forms of authority and political recognition upon them over time (Figure 1). This transformation, driven primarily by political power rather than the economic capacity of these cities, has remained at the core of my research interests to date. My UvA journey has been deeply enriched by the intellectual mentorship of Tuna Tasan-Kok, whose visionary guidance opened up new horizons and conceptual pathways in my research.

Figure 1. Municipalities that became Metropolitan Municipalities over the years. Source: Author.

Immersed in such a creative and critically engaging environment, I found myself rethinking the epistemological and methodological underpinnings of my earlier work. With a background in Public Administration, I was particularly inspired by the grounded approaches of planning scholars (particularly Professor Tuna Tasan-Kok and UGoveRN colleagues at UvA Urban Planning Group, whose generosity in sharing diverse perspectives and methods deeply enriched my thinking), especially their commitment to exploring everyday urban life and developing practice-based solutions. Their work prompted me to recalibrate and sharpen my conceptual tool: the city-region lens, originally designed to interrogate and reinterpret metropolitan governance models.


This experience has also helped me recognize a wider disciplinary disconnection in Turkey; urban governance research grounded in Public Administration often remains distant from the empirically rich and spatially informed insights of planning and geography disciplines. My time at UvA made this gap strikingly visible and unveiled new avenues for bridging it, drawing on the diverse literatures and methodological approaches I was able to engage with in depth. I now more clearly see the creative potential in cross-pollinating governance thinking with planning imagination to address the challenges of contemporary city-regional development.


City-Regions in an Age of Fragmentation and Flow

Across the globe, cities are expanding beyond the boundaries originally designed to manage them. As spatial fragmentation and functional flows reshape urban life, conventional metropolitan governance models increasingly struggle to adapt. In this context, the concept of the city-region emerges as both an analytical framework and a practical solution to the complexities of 21st-century urbanization.

The city-region is more than just an academic term. It reflects the messy, lived reality of urbanization where people commute, invest, socialize, and access services across boundaries that often make little functional sense. In city-regions, individuals commute to work, invest in property, socialize, and access public services across multiple jurisdictions, creating complex patterns of interdependence. These dynamics expose the limitations of traditional, municipality-centered governance structures and call for more flexible and relational approaches to planning, service delivery, and policy-making. Recognizing the city-region as a lived, contested, and dynamic space is therefore crucial for understanding the real challenges of managing urbanization today.

Figure 2. A model representing three provinces with distinct metropolization patterns and emerging city-regional potential. Source: Visual design adapted and modified by the author, based on Polat (2016).

In the case of Turkey, all cities have a metropolitan municipality structure that covers the entire provincial boundary. Accordingly, in Figure 2, these areas are referred to as exhibiting metropolitan development at the provincial scale. Therefore, three different conceptualizations of metropolitan development at various stages are represented across three provinces. In the central province, metropolization follows an intra-urban multicentric pattern, which means a model known as a Multi-centered Metropolitan Region (MMR) or Metropolitan Area. The other two provinces, while differing in physical-geographical form, exhibit a ‘multinuclear or polynucleated’ monocentric metropolization pattern. However, this study focuses on areas that are not currently defined by normative administrative boundaries but have the potential to function as new metropolitan areas or show high potential for such development, extending beyond a single province (As indicated in the red highlighted zones). These areas, which display inter-urban multicentered development patterns (Polycentered Urban Region-PUR), are defined as city-regions in this study and serve as the primary focus of analysis.

Mapping the Invisible: Methodology and Insights

To make these emerging territories visible, I used a two-step methodology that covers a spatial morphological analysis and functional analysis (see Figure 3).

Figure 3: Two-step research design model. Source: Author

I conducted a morphological/spatial analysis using ArcGIS 10.5 and district-level population and density data. Through hotspot and cluster outlier mapping techniques, I identified patterns of multi-centered urbanization, highlighting areas where urban activity is significantly concentrated (Figure 4). This spatial visualization allowed for the recognition of urban clusters that transcend conventional administrative boundaries.

Figure 4: Identification of urban agglomeration areas indicative of multicentered metropolization patterns. Source: Author

To complement the spatial analysis, I developed a Functional City-Regionalization Potential Index that captures the dynamic, performance-based characteristics of urban regions. The index is composed of three main groups: Accessibility, Human Capital, and Economic Structure. Each group includes specific indicators, such as transport connectivity, employment in qualified sectors, educational attainment, and enterprise density, that reflect functional integration and development potential.

The scoring system is designed to ensure comparability and transparency, applying methods such as standard deviation ranking and equal interval classification depending on the indicator. This composite index moves beyond static or morphological criteria, enabling a more nuanced classification of city-regional potentials grounded in socio-economic interaction, institutional capability, and spatial connectivity.
Based on the findings from these two analyses, 30 cities within Turkey’s Metropolitan Management System were classified as exhibiting city-regional characteristics.

A New Typology for Metropolitan Cities in the Turkish Metropolitan System

Based on my analysis, out of 30 metropolitan municipalities in Turkey, 17 showed patterns consistent with city-regionalization. To better capture their diversity, I categorized these metropolitan cities into three distinct types based on their functional characteristics.

A surprising and important finding emerged during the functional evaluation: in some cases, clusters containing only one officially designated metropolitan municipality demonstrated higher levels of functional integration and urban dynamism than areas with two or more adjacent metropolitan cities. This suggests that formal administrative status does not necessarily correspond to the actual intensity or quality of city-regionalization processes. It highlights the need for a more nuanced and functional understanding of urbanization patterns, rather than relying solely on legal or political designations.

Governance Without a Map? Implications for Policy and Institutional Design

The mismatch between functionally integrated city-regions and rigid administrative frameworks raises urgent governance challenges. Without formal recognition of these emerging urban territories, public policy remains fragmented, infrastructure investments risk being misaligned with actual patterns of use, and planning efforts tend to be reactive rather than strategic.

This disjuncture often leads to duplication of services, inefficient resource allocation, and competition rather than collaboration between neighboring jurisdictions. Moreover, key issues such as transportation planning, environmental management, and economic development, problems that inherently transcend municipal boundaries become difficult to address effectively within existing governance structures.

Recognizing and institutionalizing city-regions would not only improve the coherence of spatial planning and investment strategies but also foster a more equitable distribution of resources across metropolitan peripheries and cores. It would require innovative forms of metropolitan governance, such as multi-level coordination mechanisms, flexible jurisdictional arrangements, and participatory frameworks that engage actors across administrative borders.

In short, without a governance “map” that reflects the lived realities of urbanization, policymakers are navigating blind, perpetuating inefficiencies, and missing critical opportunities for sustainable, inclusive, and resilient regional development.

Comparative Insight: Lessons from the Randstad

My ongoing postdoctoral work also examines the Randstad region in the Netherlands, a prototypical polycentric city-region. While institutionalized differently, the Randstad demonstrates the value of long-term spatial strategies, multi-level governance coordination…

Recognizing City-Regions as Strategic Thinking Spaces

City-regions are not a passing trend, they are the emerging unit of urban reality. But they demand new ways of thinking, planning, and governing…
City-regions are not simply spatial containers or institutional puzzles. They are living, evolving arenas where policy, planning, and everyday life intersect, often without clear boundaries or agreed-upon rules. My journey from public administration to planning-informed research has revealed that acknowledging these complex urban formations is more than an analytical challenge; it is an invitation to reimagine governance itself.

In Turkey and beyond, city-regionalization offers a strategic lens through which we can better understand and shape metropolitan futures. This requires moving beyond rigid categories and embracing urban life’s dynamic, sometimes messy realities. It also calls for institutional innovation and epistemological openness, qualities that planning and governance scholars must cultivate together.

Building on these insights, my research aims to contribute to developing governance models that are not only analytically attuned to city-regional dynamics but are also normatively committed to more just, flexible, and resilient urban futures. I am motivated to further explore how planning theory and practice can be retooled to better navigate, and shape the emergent geographies of contemporary urbanization.

Resources utilized in the preparation of this blog post

Polat, E. (2016). Kentsel Yoğunlaşma/Yığışma Ekseninde Bütünleşen Kentlere Doğru…. Journal of Architectural Sciences and Applications, 1(2), 48-56.

Efe, S., & Gül, H. (2022). Devletin Mekânsal Yeniden Ölçeklendirilmesine Farklı Bir Bakış: Türkiye’deki Büyükşehirlerin Kent-Bölgeleşme Temelli Bir Analizi ve Sınıflandırması. Çağdaş Yerel Yönetimler, 31(1), 1-34.

Efe, S., & Gül, H. (2024) “Türkiye’de metropoliten kentsel gelişmenin kent-bölgesel
perspektifte bir incelemesi” İçinde Dirençli Kentler 6. Ulusal Yerel Yönetimler Sempozyumu Seçme Makaleler Kitabı (Eds. Altunok, Hatice; Kazan, Ahmet; Yıldırım, Ramazan Özcan), Ankara Üniversitesi Basım Evi: Ankara, 312-345.