Examination of the formation of urban awareness in settlements transforming from a village to a neighborhood by the metropolitan law no 6360: The case of Konya

With the Metropolitan Law No. 6360 enacted in 2012, many villages within the borders of metropolitan administrative provinces in Turkey were transformed into neighborhoods by removing their legal personality. Individuals living in these villages became urban citizens overnight. In the urban studies literature, there is not enough emphasis on how an administrative boundary change decision, which causes the smallest settlement (village) to become a part of the largest settlement (metropolitan city), affects the urban life and consciousness of people. With this study, it is desired to fill the gap in this field. This study aims to measure the level of urban consciousness formation in settlements that turned from villages to neighborhoods after the Metropolitan Law No. 6360. Within the scope of this research, it is discovered whether there is a significant change in the lives of the people living in the settlements that have been transformed into neighborhoods after the legal entity of the village has been abolished. A case study was held in five different corners of Konya taking into account the distance to the central city Konya and the district center, socio-cultural and geographical difference criteria in the Alhan Village of Ereğli District; in the Yaraşlı Village of Kulu District; in the Çaltı Village of Selçuklu District; in the Torunlar Village of Çeltik District and in the Ağılönü Village of Beyşehir District. In the research, qualitative and quantitative data were collected by document analysis, fieldwork, systematic observation and survey methods. The quantitative data collected through the survey originally developed for this research were analyzed statistically with the help of SPSS for Windows 25.0 software. In this context, Dependent Test, Independent T-Test, Mann Whitney-U Test, One-Way Variant Test, Kruskal Wallis Test, Correlation Test, Pearson and Spearman Coefficient and Chi-Square Test methods were used in statistical analysis, respectively. The results of the research revealed that, although it has been about 10 years since the adoption of the Metropolitan Law No. 6360, the urban consciousness in Konya has remained at very low levels in settlements that have returned from village to neighborhood. The neighborhoods still have a rural consciousness in general. In addition, it has been determined that there is a favorable psychological infrastructure for the formation of urban consciousness in these neighborhoods. It has been understood that as the people living in the settlements returning from the village to the neighborhood have access to urban opportunities and services, and as quick solutions are produced by the local governments, the awareness of urbanity will increase in these areas. The metropolitan municipalities, which are in a similar situation to Konya, can only make a higher effort in this direction, only if they increase their institutional capacity by one third. For this, it has been determined that metropolitan municipalities first need time, then extra financial and human resources.