In an earlier blog, I invited the reader to study the history, famous sites, and physical geography of Istanbul, one of the world’s great crossroads, through ArcGIS Explorer. I now turn to ArcGIS in order to dig deeper into the region’s cultural geography. I also expand my investigation from Istanbul to all of Türkiye –“Land of the Turks.”

In ArcMap, I load some of the same population data that is included in a newly-published GIS in education book in Turkish. It is hoped that this book of exercises, data, and software will prove as useful for Turkish-speaking educators who wish to teach with GIS as Mapping Our World proved to be for educators in the USA and elsewhere.

I created a map that would help me understand the in-migration and out-migration in each of Turkey’s 81 diverse provinces. The in-migration to each province from 1995 to 2000 is shown in blue in each pie chart on the map below, while the out-migration is shown in a pale yellow.

I varied each pie chart’s size by the amount of net population increase over the same five-year period. The relationship of pie chart size to the amount of blue in the chart shows that an excess of in-migration over out-migration leads to population increase.

To investigate the effect that cities have on the rates of in-migration versus out-migration, I created a dot density map. Here, each blue dot represents 10,000 urban dwellers, while each green dot represents 10,000 rural dwellers. As suspected, urban areas such as Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir experienced a much higher in-migration than out-migration, which makes sense given their “magnet” status.

Geographic investigations often explore the exceptions to the patterns, which are often even more interesting than the patterns themselves. The southeastern provinces of Şanliurfa and Hakkarỉ exhibited population increases but had higher out-migration than in-migration. What social factors could cause the birth rate to be higher in these regions and thus explain the population increase? Further spatial investigations are needed, and GIS provides the means to start exploring.

- Joseph Kerski, ESRI Education Manager