Reorganization of administrative division in Kırşehir province with entropy-based TOPSIS method

In Turkey, some districts have been established without considering the public interest, due to the influence of populist policies, leading to the waste of public resources. In this study, districts in Kırşehir that are deemed not in line with the public interest have been evaluated for the possibility of abolishing their legal entities or merging them with other districts either as a whole or by division. Within this framework, districts in Kırşehir that do not fulfill the criteria of being administrative centers have been identified through 36 criteria developed based on relevant laws, using entropy and TOPSIS methods. Following the TOPSIS results, the districts of Akçakent, Akpınar, and Boztepe, which have higher rank values compared to others, have been evaluated as problematic districts in meeting the conditions for administrative units; these districts were excluded, and the Thiessen Polygon method via ArcGIS program was applied to Çiçekdağı, Kaman, Mucur, and Central districts. The distances between villages near polygon boundaries and the respective districts were taken into account to determine which district these villages should be affiliated with or how these districts should be divided. Real road distances were calculated to determine which district center the village centers were closer to, and discussions were held with the village headmen of the identified villages. Based on this data, it was determined which district the villages on the TP border should be connected to, and the proposed changes in administrative affiliation of the villages were based on these discussions. The legal entities of villages with declining populations in Kırşehir were also evaluated in the study. The process of merging villages was carried out considering the minimum population limit of 150 people and the maximum distance between settlement areas of 5 kilometers, as envisaged in the regulations for establishing new villages. Based on these data, two separate models were proposed. In the first model, the province of Kırşehir would consist of the Central district, Kaman, Mucur, and Çiçekdağı districts; in the second model, while the Central district, Kaman, and Mucur districts would remain affiliated with Kırşehir, it was suggested that the Çiçekdağı district be merged with Yerköy District of Yozgat.