Population growth, economic development and rural-urban migration have caused rapid expansion of urban areas and metropolitan regions in Turkey. The structure of urban administration and planning has faced different socio-economic and political challenges, which have hindered the structured and planned development of cities and regions, resulting in an irregular and uneven development of these regions. We conducted detailed comparative analysis on spatio-temporal changes of the identified seven land-use/cover classes across different regions in Turkey with the use of Corine Land Cover (CLC) data of circa 1990, 2000, 2006 and 2012, integrated with Geographic Information System (GIS) techniques. Here we compared spatio-temporal changes of urban and non-urban land uses, which differ across regions and across different hierarchical levels of urban areas. Our findings have shown that peri-urban areas are growing more than rural areas, and even growing more than urban areas in some regions. A deeper look at regions located in different geographical zones pointed to substantial development disparities across western and eastern regions of Turkey. We also employed multiple regression models to explain any possible drivers of land-use change, regarding both urban and non-urban land uses. The results reveal that the three influencing factors-socio-economic characteristics, regional characteristics and location, and development constraints, facilitate land-use change. However, their impacts differ in different geographical locations, as well as with different hierarchical levels.

Spatial planning systems and institutions have a significant role in managing non-agricultural land growth in Europe and the assessment of how their implementation impacts on agricultural land consumption is of great significance for policy and institutional improvement. Reducing the area of agricultural land taken for urban development, or eliminating such conversion, is an international policy priority aiming to maintain the amount and quality of land resources currently available for food production and sustainable development. This study aimed to evaluate the impact of land use planning systems and institutional settings on urban conversion of agricultural land in the 265 NUTS2 level EU27 and UK regions. Taking these regions as the unit of our analysis, the research developed and used global and local econometrics models to estimate the effect based on socio-economic, institutional and land use data for the 2000–2018 period. There is limited research focusing on the impacts of institutional settings and planning types of the European countries on the conversion of agricultural land. Furthermore, existing research has not considered the spatial relationships with the determinants of agricultural land conversion and the response variable, therefore, our research aimed to contribute to the literature on the subject. The results showed that the types of spatial planning systems and institution variables significantly impact the conversion of agricultural land to urban uses. Socio-economic indicators and areas of agricultural and urban land have significant impact on agricultural land conversion for any type of spatial planning system. A further result was that decentralization and political fragmentation were positively associated with agricultural land conversion while quality of regional government and governance was negatively associated. A local regression model was assessed to explore the different spatial patterns of the relationships driving agricultural land conversion. The main empirical finding from this model was that there was spatial variation of driving factors of agricultural land conversion in Europe.