The article is an attempt to analyse 15 Turkish cities with national standards in a comparable way. In order to analyse the cases in the bigger picture socio-economic residential segregation is defined as a key issue to understand how those cities are differentiated in terms of urban divisions, group structures, and national inequalities. The article shows that concentration of the “national socio-economic wealth” is on Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir which points to a greater gap between the major cities of the country and "the others" in terms of socio-economic characteristics and this is defined both the cause and the reason of different urbanisation processes at work in the country.