3rd Urban and Regional Research Network (URRN) Symposium
3rd Urban and Regional Research Network (URRN) Symposium
City Regions, Metropolitan Areas and Metropolitans: Changing dynamics and Challenges
City regions come to the agenda with the introduction of new spatial scales that facilitates the adaptation to globalization where the specialized cities in different domains are integrated. The formation of city regions or metropolitan areas results in the agglomeration of the economic activities in addition to population in such areas. Hence, in the last 50 years, the amount of city regions or metropolitan areas increases in both developed and developing countries. From this respect, in Turkey, a similar trend might be observed. Therefore, the 3rd Symposium will be held in December 6-7, 2012 with the collaboration of Middle East Technical University and Gazi University to discuss the issue of city regions and metropolitans.
The importance of the city regions is related to the concentration of several inputs in these locations; the encouragement of foreign investments, the increase in the number of foreign visitors, the acceleration of economic growth and productivity. Hence, these areas offer a combination of the advantages of both specialization and diversity in addition to R&D activities, innovative capacity and human capital that make these areas even more attractive. However, these areas also face with certain problems in the definition of their boundaries and the identification of appropriate governance forms where a new organisation form for planning and implementation stages become more of an issue. Therefore, it is critical to discuss new multi-planar governance model, new regional policies to cope with the unbalance among regions as a result of concentration of economic investments in certain areas, the large-scaled urban transformation projects and their impacts on social environments, the socio-economic inequalities, social poverty and exclusion and the ecological concerns in relation with this phenomenon.
At this regard, in the Urban and Regional Research Network of 2012, it is attempted to develop new perspectives covering following issues; the revision of the main determinants in the understanding of the development of city regions; the evaluation of new planning approaches in city regions and metropolitan areas; the evaluation of the potential added value of city regions in policy development of national, regional and local scales; geographies of city-regions; and finally, lessons learned from city-region policies of different countries that experienced institutional restructuring and reform processes.