Estimation of variables explaining urbanization concomitant with land-use change: a spatial approach

Urbanization in India is rapidly increasing. Dispersed development along highways or surrounding cities and in rural areas is resulting in serious loss of agricultural land, open space, waterbodies, and ecologically sensitive habitats. The management and monitoring of such resources require an understanding of change in land use and land cover. Vadodara City in Gujarat, India, has been chosen as the study area because it is a rapidly developing city with increasing urbanization and industrialization. Rapid growth of the population and haphazard expansion of local planning has led to substantial loss of agricultural land, resulting in several land-use changes. Such changes have been analysed using remotely sensed data in conjunction with conventional data. This study was carried out to detect the changes that have occurred in the study area over a period of 129 years (1880-2009) at the Vadodara Mahanagar Seva Sadan (VMSS) level, i.e. the inner city level, and for 126 years (1880-2006) at the Vadodara Urban Development Authority (VUDA) level, i.e. the greater city area. The results reveal that the city expanded from 9.14 km(2) in 1880 to 136.68 km(2) in 2006, exhibiting a high rate of urbanization. Estimation of various variables, such as Shannon's entropy (SE), the urban sprawl index (USI), land consumption rate (LCR), and land absorption coefficient (LAC) related to urbanization, brought out interesting facts about the city. The results show that sprawl is high. This sprawl has evenly dispersed distribution across the space with absorption of land increasing over a period of time, but at the same time the absorbed land requires more planning and proper utilization as evident from lower LCR values. Such an understanding is a prerequisite for the sustainable planning required to counteract the perceived negative social, economic, and environmental impacts of urban sprawl.