2013 Turkish local government reorganisation

Municipalities (Turkish: belediyeler) are the basic units of local government in Turkey. According to the Turkish Statistical Institute the population of Turkey was 76,667,864 as of 31 December 2013. The majority of the population live in settlements with municipalities. The number of municipalities in Turkey was 2,947 in 2009. But in 2013, most of the small town (Turkish: belde) municipalities were merged to district (Turkish: ilçe) municipalities by the Act 6360 which came into effect at the 2014 local elections sharply decreased the number of municipalities to 1,394.

A Metropolitan (Turkish: büyükşehir) municipality is a municipality on the same level as that of the provinces (Turkish: il). In 2013, Act 6360 established metropolitan municipalities in all provinces with a population in excess of 750,000. Formerly incorporating only the urbanized central district (Turkish: merkez ilçe) and the surrounding urbanized districts of the province in which they existed, the new law incorporates all districts, rural and urban, of the province effectively abolishing the province. Within the districts of the newly created metropolitan municipalities, all existing town municipalities, villages, and rural territory were merged with the district (Turkish: ilçe) center municipalities so that all districts became second-tier municipalities.

A province center (Turkish: il merkezi) municipality is a municipality in which the government of a province (special provincial administration) is based. All province centers also serve as district centers for the district in which they are located. With the reorganization they ceased to exist in the 30 provinces which became metropolitan municipalities, but continued in the other 51 provinces.

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Wikipedia