The effects of urban sprawl on the misuse of fertile agricultural lands: Ankara case

With the industrialization movement of 20th century, urbanization has been transformed so that the cities started to expand and outspread through their hinterland and some of the urban functions started to locate outside the boundaries of settlement areas. Thus, new patterns of disjointed settlements which have discontinuity and unused areas in-between have emerged leading to a new growth model of metropolitan city called as urban sprawl.Being the rearrangement of `land? in a broader sense, city has an inevitable relation with land so that spatial expansion of cities affects the basic asset of space, land. As an indispensable natural resource for the continuity of ecosystem, land has to be used efficiently and in-balance but on the contrary, because of the factors like urbanism it is degraded by being misused.In this study, emphasizing the nonrenewal and unproducible nature of land, the effects of urban sprawl on the land caused by spatial growth of cities are explained in the case of Ankara Metropolitan Area.