Research Information System
METU JOURNAL OF THE FACULTY OF ARCHITECTURE, vol.29, no.1, pp.273-288, 2012 (AHCI)
In Turkey, the pace of industrialization and the rapid increase of urban population cause cities and their hinterland to expand, thus some of the urban functions are located outside the urban settlement boundaries. The discontinuous and disjointed settlements lead to a new growth model in the metropolitan, namely the urban sprawl. This growth mainly affects and transforms the agricultural land around cities, which is a vital natural resource for the continuity of ecosystems, and thus, has to be used efficiently. In this study, emphasizing the nature of the agricultural land, which is non-renewable and ir-reproducible, the effects of urban sprawl induced by spatial growth are explained in the case of the Ankara Metropolitan Area. The misuse of fertile agricultural land around the city is identified by using the data of the proposed macroforms in development plans and landuse maps, wich delineate an overall picture of the spatial transformation. Results show that from the 1950s to the 2000s, the rapid spatial growth and consequent dispersion of urban functions to the periphery have degraded the fertile agricultural land, in particular on the west and on the southwest axes.