Is It Still Important Centrality?: Locational Preferences of the Software Industry in Istanbul

Abstract

The software industry is one of the main driver sectors in the development of contemporary cities. The aim of this article is to analyze the location behaviors of the software industry in Istanbul with a hybrid model by determining the locations and the main factors that are effective in the location preference. Within the scope of the study, focus group interviews were conducted with 6 members of the Software Industrialists Association and a survey was conducted with 177 firm officials and the results were examined through Average Nearest Neighbor, Quartic Kernel Density, Spatial Autoregressive Model and Spatial Error Model. The findings showed that centrality is still important for the firms and most of them benefit from urban agglomeration. While the firms are clustered in the CBD and sub-centers, we have concluded that the spatial behavior patterns of the firms have also changed according to their capital size. Urban agglomeration explains the local-scale software industry in the literature but does not provide sufficient arguments to analyze it on a global scale. However, it is foreseen that the findings may vary in a particular way if the firms are examined by separating according to production manner. © 2025 ETH–Eidenössiche Technische Hochschule Zürich.