Measuring Urban Land Use Change and Sprawl Using Geospatial Techniques: A Study on Purulia Municipality, West Bengal, India

Abstract

Population growth, desire for more income, transportation facilities and rural to urban migration have increased the rate of urbanisation and complicated its pattern over Purulia district, West Bengal, India. This situation obstructs the organised and planned urban development provoking the sprawl like phenomenon within the urban locality. As the district belongs to a socio-economic deprived region, most of the researchers mainly concentrate on the physical and socio-economic problems of the district neglecting the scenario of urbanisation over the district. So, the present study is an attempt to assess the urban growth modelling over the Purulia Municipality which is a dominating city in terms of population and urban functions in the district. Images from Landsat-5 Thematic mapper (TM) and Landsat-8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) were used to prepare land use land cover (LULC) maps of 1998, 2008 and 2018. Supervised classification with maximum likelihood classifier was applied. Direction-based relative Shannon’s entropy model has been used for quantification of urban expansion in the last 20 years. The LULC changing condition shows that 65.41% vegetation coverage, 47.63% water body, 31.55% bare land and 10.79% agricultural land have been diminished within this time due to increasing demand for artificial man-made land. Besides, the built-up area has grown by 122% within the 20 years which proved that urban physical expansion is going on over the municipality. The results show that the pattern of urban growth of this municipality is a compact one, and the built-up areas are mostly oriented towards North, North-east, East, South-east and South directions than the other quadrants. Besides, the percentage of built-up area has been rapidly decreasing from CBD to periphery area due to increasing distance. For the planning purpose of balance development in a socio-economic deprived region like Purulia district, the outcomes of this study can best be utilised by the local planners and administrators.