Abstract
The study was aimed at assessing the dynamics of land conversions for urban development and their impact on environmental planning in addition to assessing the characteristics of urban sprawl in Mbarara Municipality. To determine the dynamics of land conversion for urban development in Mbarara Municipality since 1984, Landsat images for the years 1984, 1999, and 2014 were classified using multi-spectral classification techniques to enable the creation of land cover maps. Population and built-up area density were used as a measure of sprawl for Mbarara Municipality. The built-up area had increased by 107 % between 1984 and 1999 and by 37 % between 1999 and 2014 while the overall growth of built-up area between 1984 and 2014 was found out to be 182 %. This variation in growth is attributed to the introduction of environmental controls and policies that largely checked the rate of growth between 1999 and 2014. The overall growth has affected the size of the area covered by other land uses which were seen to greatly fluctuate over the years. The characteristics of urban sprawl in Mbarara Municipality typically depict strip, cluster, and leapfrog sprawl. Based on the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) sprawl index, Mbarara Municipality was found to have sprawled at a rate of 7.7 % between 1984 and 1999 and −7.6 % between 1999 and 2014. The overall sprawl rate between 1984 and 2014 was −4.3 %. The study suggests that smart growth strategies, upholding zoning practices and the enactment of laws to check illegal land conversions are important to check sprawl.
Highlights
The concept of urban sprawl is usually associated with the uncontrolled expansion of urban areas into the surrounding countryside, forming low-density and poorly planned patterns of development
Urban sprawl is closely linked with the concept of per capita land consumption explained as a measure of how thinly or thickly a population is spread across a given area of land and this in turn determines its population density (Beck et al 2003)
The continued trend of land cover change and conversion in Mbarara Municipality is largely attributed to the growth in the size of the built-up area by 187 % between 1984 and 2014
Summary
The concept of urban sprawl is usually associated with the uncontrolled expansion of urban areas into the surrounding countryside, forming low-density and poorly planned patterns of development. The increasing population is a great contributing factor towards urban sprawl. This involves the conversion of open space or rural land into built-up, developed, or urbanized land over time. Other scholars argue that urban sprawl is development that is basically chopped-up, spread-out, segregated, low-density and is characterized by automobile dependent development (Rowley 2001). This situation is known as horizontal spreading or dispersed urbanization and is associated with a scattered population of low density living in separate residential areas, with poor access, often over-dependent on motorized transport and missing well-
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