Location Patterns of Restaurants in Istanbul

Abstract

Dining out plays an important role for the residents of the post-modern day Istanbul in terms of recreational purposes. The location of restaurants reflects the impacts of the transformation of the city’s cultural life on the urban structure. This paper investigates the spatial distribution of restaurants in Istanbul between 1997 and 2013. Over this period of time, while the number of restaurants has increased in all of the concentric zones in the city, their ratio has decreased in the core and in the intermediate zones, while it has increased in the periphery, especially in the sub-centers. In this paper, regression analysis was used to investigate the spatial distribution of restaurants. The number of restaurants was taken as the dependent variable, and the socio-economic characteristics of the districts and the distance from the sea coast were taken as the independent variables. The results of the study reveal that, in 1997, the relation between the number of restaurants and population, GNP/pc and the distance from the sea shore had a significant effect on the location of restaurants. In 2013, however, population has become less influential and income has become more significant due to the economic growth in the periphery of the metropolitan area. This is the consequence of the multi-center development of the city, the suburbanization of higher income groups to a certain extent and the increase in the consumption services on account of multiculturalism arising from globalization.