New Approaches in Defining the Structure of Urban Settlement Systems

Abstract

Technological developments such as the extensive use of modern communication tools and increasing infrastructure opportunities have changed the spatial organization forms and daily life practices in cities. Previously, central place theory, which explains hierarchical urban patterns based on the minimum population size-based threshold concept and the maximum distance-based range concept has become incompetent to explain the spatial organization of today's settlements. At this point, in defining the urbanization processes and explaining the spatial organization, the search for new conceptual and methodological approaches has become important. In this study, changing urban systems are evaluated in terms of closeness centrality, attribute centrality, network centrality, and geographical centrality based on space of flows and interpreted by current parameters. It is concluded that in defining the structure and spatial organization of urban systems, the morphological and functional dimensions of urban systems should be evaluated besides the parameters of population, geographical proximity or network relations. In this context, a model proposal has been developed by using current parameters such as density, diversity, mobility, connectivity, spatial-temporal structure, and urban networks.