Istanbul, Ankara tops among world’s cities

Hurriyet Daily News with wires

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Doğan News Agency reported that research undertaken by Mastercard ranked Istanbul as 15th among 65 developing cities worldwide and Ankara as 50th, the first two cities were listed as China’s Shanghai and Beijing.

The evaluation took into account various factors, such as the economic and trade environment, economic development, employment, the financial service environment, trade networks, education and IT networks, quality of life, risk and security. The study said cities in the "BRIC" bloc, consisting of Brazil, Russia, India and China, were at the center the new global market.

In the world ranking, China’s 15 cities dominated the first 30. The European cities featured were, in order, Budapest, Warsaw, Moscow, Istanbul and Ankara at eighth.

In the financial service environment, Istanbul ranked ninth globally, while it ranked eight in trade networks and seventh in quality of life.

Flocking to larger cities
Meanwhile, a study done by the Turkish Statistics Institution, or TÜİK, that compared data from the last two censuses from 2000 and 2007, showed the number of municipalities in Turkey that have decreased in population exceeded those that increased.

According to 2007 results, 37 municipalities had an increase in population while 44 decreased. The city with the greatest increase of 2,555,000 was Istanbul, whose population is now 12,573,836, followed by Ankara, İzmir, Bursa and Gaziantep, all of which also had a significant increase, reported Anatolia News Agency.

The city with the smallest increase was Zonguldak, with 291 people. The cities of Kahramanmaraş and Ağrı faired slightly better. The city with the greatest decrease was Konya, which lost 233,084 residents, followed by Trabzon and Tokat.

Municipalities with a population under 1 million did not see any changes in residents. Cities with a population of between 100,000 to 200,000 did not see significant changes, except for Çankırı that had a population drop of 270,355 to 174,012 residents.

The two cities with less than a population of 100,000, Tunceli and Bayburt, saw no significant changes in 2007.

Growth slowing down
The total population of Turkey has increased by 2,782,329 in the last seven-year period and is now at 70,586,256. While the number of cities that had a population decrease exceeded those that increased, the speed of population growth also decreased. According to projections made from the 1998 to 2008 trend, this year’s growth of 1.18 percent will decline to 1.11 percent next year and be less than 1 percent by 2015.

By 2046, population growth will drop to nearly zero and the population will stabilize at 89,000,165 citizens and by 2050 population will have begun to decrease by less than 0.001 percent.