The smart city approach and the opportunities on applications in metropolitan municipalities of Turkey: The cases of Gaziantep Metropolitan Municipality and Hatay Metropolitan Municipality

Since the Industrial Revolution, being a precipitating force, the increasing population with the intense migration movement towards the cities has brought many problems with it, indeed these are the irregular spatial growth and structuring in cities, the inadequacy of the cities in the provision of services, the inability to meet the increasing needs and the other problems such as housing, education, health, transportation, security, traffic and environment. This situation has revealed that need for a new city model and its own practices is inevitable in solving the problems faced by cities, in ensuring and maintaining urban sustainability, in the effective and efficient use of resources, and in providing urban services with more innovative and high quality. At this point, "smart city models and practices", which gained importance, have become virtually a city guide for city administrations in search of solutions to urban problems. Many problems are solved quickly and effectively thanks to smart city applications, which express the integration of technology with the city and produce innovative solutions to urban problems with the help of technology, indeed these solutions are artificial intelligence, internet of things, big data, open data, broadband, virtual/augmented reality, the use of three-dimensional printers. The smart city applications, which were at the beginning level in the 1990s, are now indispensable for local governments in the world and in Turkey. Morever, smart city applications, the seeds of which were first planted in Turkey in the 2000s, have started to gain popularity rapidly until today. This study, in which smart city practices carried out by Gaziantep and Hatay Metropolitan Municipalities are investigated in order to compare them in term of their components about the framework of smart city characteristics has sought some answers for the questionable status "whether the cities that gained metropolitan status earlier have an advantage in terms of smart city applications compared to cities that became metropolitan later than themselves", by doing research on the cases of Gaziantep and Hatay. This thesis is very important because it reveals that the city of Gaziantep, which is the subject of the thesis, attained the metropolitan status earlier than the city of Hatay, thus, it started smart city applications earlier and caused it to adapt to it, and also put into practice many smart city applications in more and different areas. KEY WORDS City, Urbanization, Smart City, Gaziantep Metropolitan Municipality, Hatay Metropolitan Municipality