Ruşen Keleş starts by displaying the universal character of urbanisation processes and moves on to express his opinions on urban planning. He then introduces some of the main concepts in the field of city planning, and explores different ways of defining a ‘city’ through various viewpoints. He devotes a separate section to the process of urbanisation. He investigates the way various disciplines such as sociology, economics, demography and city planning deal with urban processes as a field of study.

The author looks at rural-urban balances and studies some examples where this balance is disturbed. Thereafter, he explores different attributes of urbanisation in industrialised and non-industrialised countries, and then looks at the pre-conditions that give rise to urbanisation and the specific factors that speed up the process. These pre-conditions include the density of the agrarian population and the intensity of agricultural production, as well as technological advances and effects of the Industrial Revolution. The author counts economic, political and psycho-social factors as catalysts in urban development.

In the second half of the book the author evaluates the effects of urbanisation on the physical appearance, administration and social development of towns, as well as on the regional and national economy. He investigates the ways in which urbanisation processes have been analysed by various disciplines. He presents the methods employed in urban planning and provides information on ways of establishing control over activities such as collective planning, zoning and subdivision of plots. The author seeks an answer to the question of how to create balanced urbanisation policies which take into account population movements and a balanced distribution of industrial activities. He looks at examples from India, Israel, the Netherlands and Puerto Rico, to analyse the ways in which national urbanisation policies have been implemented in these countries, before dealing with the urbanisation movement in Turkey. In this part, the historical development of urbanisation is investigated and the author presents his views on why and how different cities and regions achieved differing levels of urbanisation.

The book was written in the 1960s, before the full extent of the negative effects of immigration to cities was revealed; therefore, the author asserts that if national urban planning is conducted with a positive and optimistic outlook, immigration will pose no structural problems to cities. On the other hand, he makes some suggestions with a view to shaping urban planning in a way that will prevent the possible negative outcomes of immigration: these suggestions are still valid today.

Özge Soylu Bozdağ

Translated by Aysu Dinçer