Spatial modeling of urban sprawl around Greater Bhubaneswar city, India

Abstract

In developing countries, where urbanization rates are high, urban sprawl is a significant contributor of the land use change. However, characterizing sprawl has become a contentious issue with numerous arguments both for and against the phenomenon. Meanwhile, effective metrics to characterize sprawl in India are required to characterize this. We have attempted to capture urban sprawl over the landscape and hence adopt landscape metrics, entropy and principal component analysis for characterizing sprawling process. The measurement and monitoring of land-use changes in these areas are crucial to government officials and city planners who urgently need updated information for planning and management purposes. This paper examines the use of landscape metrics and entropy in the measurement and monitoring of urban sprawl by the integration of remote sensing and GIS techniques. The advantages of the entropy method are its simplicity and easy integration with GIS. The measurement of entropy is devised based on locational factors-distances from central business district and reveal spatial patterns of urban sprawl. The entropy space can be conveniently used to differentiate various kinds of urban growth patterns. The application of the method in the Bhubaneswar Metropolitan Area, one of the fastest growing and planned cities in India, has demonstrated that it is very useful and effective for the monitoring of urban sprawl. It provides a useful tool for the quantitative measurement that is much needed for rapidly growing regions in identifying the spatial dynamics, variations and changes of urban sprawl patterns.