Monitoring Urban Sprawl and Land-Use Change Detection with GIS and Remote Sensing Techniques in Latifabad Town Hyderabad, Pakistan

Abstract

Constant rapid urbanization is associated with the reduction of natural resources and the expansion of irregular and uncontrolled expansion, rapidly increased population, and increasing immigrants towards urban areas. In this paper, land-use change is considered the main component in monitoring urban growth. In the context of land-use change, the study analyzes the gap of sustain infrastructure; led towards the conversion of residential areas into commercial areas and subdivisions of various plots. Latifabad town, situated in Hyderabad city of Pakistan is taken as a case study having almost the area densely populated spreading through fragmented development towards the fringes of the town. In the year 2016, 0.7 million people were living in Latifabad town, which was designed for 60,000 people. To measure land-cover change and urban growth, data collection was based on the spatial description of the area to measure and time factor via static to dynamic development. Quantitative data measures were done using ArcGIS and were obtained by satellite images of 1991, 2000, 2010, and 2016. The analysis was done through image processing and classification of images, change detection analysis of urban growth rate, post-classification matrix, transitional probability matrix, and future land use statistics. Some of the proposed strategies are then discussed in reducing urban sprawl. The research can be beneficial to reduce the sprawl as it can give directions to local development authorities if considered; the sprawl can be reduced at a certain level.