Socioeconomic development index ranking calculations of cities with fuzzy clustering method: case of Turkey

In economy policies, socioeconomic indicators have an important place in determining the development levels. The determination and classification of the current social and economic structure of cities is considerably important in analyzing the development of cities and their probable development tendencies and in developing the regional development policies in parallel with this. In this study, cities are classified by fuzzy clustering c-means method according to their development levels with the help of socio-economic indicators. The aim is to determine the homogeneous city groups having the same characteristics based on these indicators. The data gathered from the study have been compared with some other classification studies in the literature. In this paper, development levels of cities were classified with socioeconomic indicators using FCM. Development Index values used for cities classification upon socioeconomic indicators. Results were also compared with DPT and Is-Bank development index values and interpreted.