Eskisehir

Eskisehir's most valuable export is systems competence. The city is usually marketed as a pleasant university town with trams and riverfront cafes, but its harder economic truth is that one inland Anatolian city has spent decades quietly training the engineers and machinists who keep Turkish trains, engines, and industrial components running.

The official story is not wrong. Eskisehir sits at 794 metres above sea level between Ankara and Istanbul and now has about 826,716 residents. It is one of Turkey's best-known student cities, anchored by Anadolu University and Eskisehir Osmangazi University, with a polished center that feels more European than many provincial capitals. But that livability is not separate from the economy. It is part of the production system.

What the postcard version misses is the industrial lineage. The local rail works built Karakurt, Turkey's first domestically produced steam locomotive, in 1961. That capability never vanished; it branched. Rolling-stock know-how stayed in the city through the rail factories, while TUSAS Engine Industries made Eskisehir one of Turkey's most important centers for aircraft-engine manufacturing and maintenance. Ceramics, household goods, machinery, and rail equipment all benefit from the same technician base. This is path dependence with teeth: once a city becomes good at precision metalwork, testing, and industrial training, adjacent sectors show up because the hard part has already been done. In biological terms it looks like adaptive radiation, with one engineering niche splitting into several related ones.

Eskisehir also practices niche construction. The universities, transit system, and unusually orderly public realm are not decoration; they are labor-market infrastructure that helps firms recruit inland without paying Istanbul costs. Over time that has produced positive-feedback loops: more technical employers attract more students and engineers, which justifies more training capacity, which attracts still more employers.

Biologically, Eskisehir behaves like a beaver colony. Beavers create durable value by altering flows with infrastructure. Eskisehir does the same with workshops, labs, and training pipelines. The city matters because technical habitats, once built well, keep compounding.