Quantifying Urban form: A Case Study of Rajshahi City

Urbanisation process heralds land use changes and consumption of energy which contribute significantly to global warming. This necessitates developing sustainable cities, which entails evolving effective urban planning strategies with the regular monitoring of landscape dynamics. In this context, the current communication reports of urban growth in Hyderabad-the IT capital of India based on the analysis of spatial and temporal heterogeneity of the urban land use changes that helped in the identification of urbanized and sprawling areas. The land use analysis through remote sensing data of the period 1975 to 2009 shows a significant urban growth with an increase in impervious surface from 0.17% to 13.55%. Gradient based spatial metrics analysis reveals the tendency of sprawl at outskirts and the clumped or aggregated growth in core areas. This spatially explicit information helps in the advanced visualization of urban growth for an appropriate and strategic future planning of the city.

Geology, Ecology, and Landscapes

Urban Residential land development and redevelopment intensity (LDR) act as an essential index to understand magnitude of urban livability and sustainable development. Recent urbanization pattern of Rajshahi city has made a rising demand for land, which made it a precious commodity. As a result of it, Rajshahi City Corporation (RCC) area is undergoing significant residential LDR in recent years. The understanding of factors influencing this residential LDR has great importance in real estate development as well as overall housing situation of thecity. For this purpose, this study tries to explore the spatial characteristics of LDR. Relative Operating Characteristics (ROC) test statistics (>0.5) with improve hedonic model are set out to identify the internal drivers of LDR. Finally, geostatistics is explored by integrating methods of Geographic Information System (GIS) and SPSS regression analysis to analyze the correlation between LDR and driving factors. The spatial distribution of residential LDR has shown a strong distance decline law. One of the most exciting findings was that increase in distance to Central Business District (CBD) from the residential land has a slight influence on LDR. The outcomes of the paper will be beneficial for investors and policy-makers in their development decision-making processes.

Remote Sensing of Land, 2020

Monitoring and measurement of urban growth pattern with the help of urban-rural gradient and spatial metrics are gaining significant importance in recent times. Rapid and unplanned urban growth has a great impact on natural resources, local ecology, forestry and infrastructure. Temporal satellite data, gradient analysis and landscape metrics of urban landscapes will help to evolve appropriate strategies for integrated planning and sustainable management of natural resources. This communication focuses on spatiotemporal patterns of land use dynamics of Howrah Municipal Corporation (HMC), India and its surroundings with six buffer zones of 2kms. Analysis has been carried out on HMC using temporal remote sensing data. HMC has been used to identify the changes in the gradient of urban to peri-urban and rural regions. Further, the entire study area has been divided into eight zones radiated from city center based on directions. Different landscape metrics have been computed for each zone...

IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering, 2020

With the advent of the housing problem in Kut city, many residents have resorted to set up informal housing scheme to achieve the need for housing. This has a significant urban, environmental and social impact on those residents. This research focuses on the impact of unplanned growth of urban areas on the environmental behavior. The phenomenon of random or informal housing is one of the most negative urban phenomena facing larger cities because of the burden on the processes of economic and social development. In Kut city, there are a lot of scattered areas such as Al-Hakim1, Al-Hakim2, Al-Jawadeen neighborhood, etc. Most of these areas were agricultural, areas for military use and vacant lands then they were encroached upon by the indiscriminate residential encroachment which has a negative impact on them. GIS is used to study the temporal and spatial changes of this phenomenon from 2005 to 2017 and to estimate the percentage of change of each period and the disparity in the areas...

Applied Geomatics, 2014

Urbanization connotes to the growth of a metropolis on being subjected to criteria such as economic, social and political forces as well as the geomorphology of the metropolis. As population and its activities increase in a city, the boundary of the city expands to accommodate growth along the urban fringes, leading to fragmented urban morphology, thereby impacting local ecology. Towns and cities had bloomed post-independence in India, causing changes in the land use along the myriad landscapes and ecosystems of the country. These urban ecosystems were a consequence of unplanned development of industrial centres and uncontrolled growth of residential colonies, which altogether became hubs for economic, social, cultural, and political activities. A visualization of the past trends and patterns of growth enable the planning machineries to plan for appropriate basic infrastructure facilities (water, electricity, sanitation, etc.). This communication analyses the spatial patterns of Kolkata municipality-the 13th most populous and 8th largest urban agglomeration in the world. It has been one of the most prominent urban areas in eastern India which was once considered the capital of India during the erstwhile British colonial rule. The spatial patterns of urbanization of Kolkata with 10 km buffer have been analysed using temporal remote sensing data with zonal gradients and spatial metrics. The study area was divided into four zones and each zone was further divided into concentric circles of 1 km incrementing radii to understand the patterns and extent of urbanization at local levels. Its land use analysis has revealed a decline of vegetation from 33.6 % (1980) to 7.36 % (2010). During 2010, Kolkata's built-up had constituted 8.6 %, water bodies comprised of 3.15 %, whereas other categories made up about 80.87 %. Increased Shannon's entropy during the last decade highlights the tendency of sprawl that necessitated policy interventions to provide basic amenities. Spatial patterns through metrics indicated a compact and simple structured growth at the centre of the city and a distributed complex shape in the buffer region. Further, these metrics indicated that the city is on the verge of becoming a single large urban patch that would affect its ecological integrity. Temporal analyses of spatial patterns of urbanization help the city administration and city planners to visualize and understand the growth of the city so that they can provide better resource planning to create a sustainable city.

Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, 2020

As the urban development continues, different parts of a city can grow or decay by varying degrees due to natural deterioration or changes in governmental policies. City is the center for business, culture, and social activities; is the place that reflects geography, commerce, society, and culture context; is a complex whole that is woven by “people,” “activity,” and “space” “People” in the “space” can process “activities,” therefore, activities and space can influence each other. In this research, we aim to obtain insights on urban morphology by analyzing the changes in urban spaces’ “activity” patterns. We aim to explore the relationship between urban spatial configuration and functionality. Space syntax methodology is applied to investigate the urban spatial structure concurrently with the analytic hierarchy process method for evaluating experts’ survey responses to attain urban functionality index. Subsequently, the analytical data are compared and categorized to reveal the city...

This study illustrates the use of remote sensing and geographic information system (GIS) techniques (i.e. geospatial techniques) for mapping and evaluating the emerging problems which is related to spatial variation in urban living condition in Hyderabad district, Telangana State. The expansion of Urban has brought serious losses of different types of land like water bodies, agriculture land, vegetation land etc. For a variety of urban environmental issues like increased air pollution, runoff and subsequent flooding, increased local temperature, deterioration of water quality, etc Urban sprawl is responsible. In this work we have taken Rangareddy District, Ghatkesar Mandal as case to study the spatial variation and land cover change that took place in a span of 05 years from 2005 to 2015. Remote sensing methodology is adopted to study the geographical land use changes occurred during the study period. Satellite data-Resource Sat with LISS-IV and cartosat-1 with 2.5 m stereo images were taken into consideration for preparing hybrid products. Image pre-processing, is done first later supervised classification has been performed to classify the images in to different land use categories. The accuracy of the Classification is also estimated through field surveys. This paper also highlights the changes in other land cover categories during which causes emerging problems the period under analysis. This study may provide reliable inputs for urban planners who are planning to provide basic amenities such as transportation, water, sanitation, electricity, etc.

Rapid urban growth is a common phenomenon of the developing countries. Now, in India about 30 percent of the people are living in urban areas but in all respect urbanization does not mean the higher economic growth. Increasing urbanization means a lot of land has been converted from rural to urban. This conversion is responsible for quick changes of landuse and land cover in urban areas. So, information of land use and land cover change is highly necessary for different groups. Analyzing and modelling these changes, therefore, provide better information for urban planners and decision makers to design strategies and solutions to manage the impacts of land use and land cover changes in both spatial and temporal scales. Viewing the present scenario, the author has tried to focus on urban land use concentration model and ultimately develop the pattern of urban landuse specialization and diversification status.

The compact city concept is adopted in city planning policies of many developed countries for the following benefits: efficient use of land while curtailing sprawl, reduction in transport network and reliance on mass transport, a socially interactive environment with vibrancy of activities, economic viability, etc. However, it is still debated whether the cities in developing countries like India, which are already dense, will really benefit from the compact city form. Measuring urban form and compactness of these cities becomes more important for understanding the spatial urban structure to intervene accordingly for sustainable urban development. This paper explores various parameters and dimensions of measurement of compactness. Urban form characteristics and their indicators are derived for the study of Nagpur city, India. This study is an attempt to measure the urban form to derive the benefits of compactness. The study indicates that Nagpur city, inherently has a compact form, but may disperse in near future; and there is a need to implement policies to retain its compact character to achieve sustainable urban development.

Journal of the Indian Society of Remote Sensing, 2011

In recent years, there has been lot of emphasis on the study of urban land use/ land cover changes to discover the growth pattern due to rapid urbanisation. This study presents spatial metrics and gradient analysis approach for quantifying and capturing changes in urban landscape using LISS III imagery of 1999, 2001 and 2004 of Gurgaon, India. A combination of spatial metrics i.e. percentage of landscape, mean patch size, number of patches, landscape shape index and largest patch index, available in Fragstats ver. 3.3, have been used to quantify the patterns of urban growth in different directions in terms of size, shape and complexity of development. The local built-up areas were quantified by the "moving window" technique. A gradient analysis has been carried out through sampling from a reference point to 8 km in 16 directions with a window size of 500 mts. Results of this study demonstrate the potential of spatial metrics and gradient modelling to quantify the impact of regional factors on the growth pattern of Gurgaon city.