Determination of public lands on the location selection of university campusses

Universities, which have changed in the historical process in terms of both the institutional functioning and the approaches that direct the location selection decisions, are one of the issues that directly concern the urban planning with their features. Since the first day they emerged, these institutions have played a major role in shaping the city in which they are located, because universities bring a movement and revival with themselves in their regions and cause different urban functions to emerge around them. For these reasons, it becomes inevitable that the irresponsible problems that affect the city as a whole will be inevitable if the university campuses which are vital for the urban planning process are not handled with different dimensions of the location selection decisions and these decisions are not considered as a part of the urban planning. In this study, the concept of university, related definitions and functions are emphasized and its historical development process is examined. Which criteria are taken into consideration in the location selection of universities and the historical development of location selection decisions have been put forward. Then, it is mentioned in which ways it affects the cities. Finally, it has been discussed how the approach of present state university campuses in the country-regional and urban scale in the process of decision-making in Turkey and how this approach is reflected to the cities in spatial sense. The aim of this study is to determine the reasons of the campuses of the state universities in Turkey, on which lands and at which points of the city, and to determine the spatial effects of these location selection decisions on the cities by considering the urban planning dimension. As a result of the investigations, in Turkey it was observed that the campuses of the state universities mainly chose the land which was partly or totally owned by the public to aim to reduce the cost of land acquisition. The findings of the research show that this location selection decision approach results in the settlement of the settlements outside the cities and in disconnected areas, and the process is an accepted and sustained understanding in Turkey. In the location selection processes, university settlements that have chosen such places without considering the urban planning dimension have been observed to adversely affect the cities in an unpredictable way, sometimes causing cities to develop and spread in the direction of campuses, and sometimes they create settlements around them which is detached from the city. Keywords: University Campuses, Location Selection, Public Land