Transformation of agricultural production and ownership structures in rural areas: The case of İzmir-Menderes

Spatial forms are in constant motion. Rural and urban areas, including the intermediate transition zones, are the dominant areas that live and reflect this movement. Nowadays, this state of movement emerges especially through urban sprawl movements that work against the countryside. This trend, which leads to the blurring of rural-urban all over the world, is gaining momentum with the metropolitanization process. In this context, the aim of the study is to examine the urban traces in rural areas through agricultural production and property transformation and to reveal cause-effect analysis. Thus, the focus has been on which developments in conventional agricultural production and ownership structures caused disruptions in production and what kind of reflections this had on agricultural lands. Assuming that the developments in the production structures bring about a transformation on the agricultural land ownership, which is the means of production, the existence of urban sprawls on the lands that have lost their defense mechanism has been determined. The transformation, which was discussed in the study on how and why, was designed as a case study according to the principles of qualitative research method in accordance with its subject and purpose. Thus, semi-structured interview questions, which is a qualitative research technique, were applied and observation notes were kept for the transformation process in the relevant field. The resulting data was made meaningful by coding according to the content analysis in the qualitative data processing program called MAXQDA Analytics Pro (Computer-Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software-CAQDAS). In the analyzes, it has been explained according to the reasons and frequencies that the agricultural production structures in rural areas have entered an intense disintegration process, especially the small family production. In addition, it was observed that the deterioration in production triggered a transformation on agricultural lands in the context of ownership. Because the producers sell their agricultural lands, and the sold lands are mostly turned into non-purpose settlements for urban use. Ownership transformations for this non-purpose use were supported by using visual data. In this context, location data were created by making point assignments to the areas that were used as agricultural land in 2012 satellite images but turned into settlements in 2021 satellite images. These data were processed in ArcGIS Pro/ArcMap and QGIS programs and visual data that embodied the transformation were obtained. In addition, with 2012-2021 comparative satellite images, the ownership transformation for non-purpose use has been revealed. The determination of the beginning year of the visual data as 2012 is based on the qualitative research findings. Because, according to the results obtained, it has been determined that the transformation of villages into neighborhoods after the law numbered 6360 has negative consequences on agricultural production and property structures. It has been revealed that this situation both affects the transformation in production and has corrosive results on ownership. Keywords: Rural Transformation, Rural-Urban Blurring, Urban Sprawl, Transformation in Agriculture.