Social municipality: The case of Zonguldak Municipality

Nowadays, municipalities play an efficent role in social policy with the understanding of social municipality in many developed and developing countries. Social municipality is a mentality that gives duties and responsibilities to the municipalities in order to protect the powerless people (poor, old, disabled, sick, women, children, etc.) in the society, to increase the welfare and contribute to the socialization of the society, to improve the local economy and to ensure local development. The purpose of this study is to reveal the services provided by Zonguldak Municipality within the scope of social municipality understanding; to determine the services with those who benefited from these services and the satisfaction of citizens from social municipal activities of Zonguldak Municipality. In first part, the evaluation of the literature on the social welfare state and social municipality is included. After the evaluation, the data of the survey which collected from citizens who residing in the neighborhoods of Zonguldak Central district was analyzed through the IBM SPSS Statistics 22 program. When evaluating these activities, participants who benefited from social assisance and services have marked the succesful option at a higher rate. On the other hand, participants stated that they found Zonguldak Municipality's activities within the scope of social municipality to be insufficent. Also, some problems determined such as the participants are not aware of the services of the municipality and the citizens do not have sufficient information about the services of the municipality.