Towards the New Regionalism Approach in the Metropolitan Governance of Turkey

The Greater Municipality Law (no. 5216) was enacted in 2004 in order to coordinate the governance of metropolitan areas in Turkey. In fact, this law has been a part of the restructuring process of the government in public domain as well as of the centralization and metropolitan governance approaches. However, the evaluation of this law displays many conflicts and uncertainties discussed by this study. Analysing the Law no. 5216, this study explores the case of Izmir Greater Municipality from the aspects of metropolitan governance approaches. The study findings suggest that this law conflicts with the issues of functionality along with its definition of metropolitan area boundaries, has problems related to the boundaries, efficiency and incomes of the district municipalities, causes complexities about the distribution of authority between district municipalities and greater municipalities in an unbalanced structure of responsibility and authority for planning issues, and has uncertainties related to the principles of sustainable planning and participation processes.