Fatih Terziis a research assistant in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at Istanbul Technical University. He has an MSc degree from the Urban Planning Program at Istanbul Technical University. Areas of interest include housing policy, urban renewal and squatter settlements upgrading. His recent research focused on real estate development -housing and retail -and economic growth. Hasan Mutluis a city planner who is experienced in GIS software development. For the past 5 years he has provided consultancy services to local government projects on the effective usage of GIS in urban planning and developed a number of urban mathematical models. He is also involved in Real Estate research with a particular focus on offi ce rent rates and land values in Istanbul. Vedia Dokmeciis a Professor at the Technical University of Istanbul from where she received an engineering / architecture degree, and subsequently gained an MSc and PhD from Colombia University, New York. She has had several articles published in a number of international journals in relation to location theory, hospital planning, urbanization in developing countries, city systems, factory location, community satisfaction, location of library system, hotels and real estate markets in Istanbul. In 1999 she was given Science Award by the Turkish Academy of Sciences. AbstractAfter 1980s, globalisation and economic restructuring encouraged the growth of the number of shopping centres in Istanbul. As their number increased, retail market became more competitive, which resulted in a vital need to investigate retail potential of new shopping centre locations. This paper investigates the spatial distribution of existing shopping malls and tries to estimate the retail potential of those districts that do not have any shopping centre yet. Of the 32 districts that make up Istanbul, only 16 have shopping malls. Two historical districts and one summer resort area on the islands are excluded from the analysis. A gravity model is applied to determine the retail potential of the 13 remaining districts that do not have shopping centres yet. Income of the districts, distances to the existing and proposed shopping centres and their sizes are taken as variables in the analysis. According to the results of the study, the districts are ranked with respect to their retail potential. Future research investigating the impact of characteristics of shopping malls and demographic characteristics of consumers and distance on the shopping behaviours of customers would add further value to the research.

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The first task of the city planner is to effectively locate integrated land use types for various objectives. The Multi Objective Land Use Planning Model developed to achieve this goal, aims to maximize land value and minimize the transportation. The genetic algorithm method developed to find the optimum layout according to the Multi-Objective Land Use Planning Model has been explained, the success and performance of the process has been tested with artificial data, and its usability in real problems has been examined. According to the results of the study, using this method, it is revealed that layout plans that are very close to the maximum efficiency value can be found within 1 day in cities with a population of up to 1,000,000, within 1 week in cities up to 5,000,000, and within 1.5 months in cities close to 16,000,000. By examining the results, the deficiencies of this method are determined and the suggestions for improvement of this method are stated. The problem chosen in this study is a problem that most city planners have to solve and the developed application has been opened to the use of other experts. This makes this work unique as it allows planning experts who are incapable of developing such methods to experiment.

In this study, the spatial distribution of pharmacies is investigated in Istanbul by taking into consideration their important role for the health care delivery system. First, the growth of the number of pharmacies is compared with the growth rate of population at the city level during the last two decades within perspective of changes in health care delivery policies. Then, the growth of the number of pharmacies is compared with respect to the population growth rate of the core, intermediate and peripheral zones. The second, the changes in the pharmacy market areas are compared at the city level and in the core, intermediate and peripheral zones within the same period. Third, the regression analysis is used to show the relationships between the number of pharmacies in the districts and the population, number of hospital beds and number of physicians during the same period of time. Suggestions are made for more balanced distribution of pharmacies in order to prevent bankruptcies while sufficient accessibility provided for the customers, and for future research.

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