Assessment of urban sprawl using proximity factors in Lucknow City, India

Urban sprawl usually expands in regularized and natural forms, and the character of an urban sprawl is found complex and unclear. Therefore, it becomes necessary to distinguish the character of an urban sprawl for sustainability in all aspects. In this paper, we have identified the proximity factors by which we could distinguish between both forms, i.e., regularized and natural expansion. We performed buffer analysis to calculate the areas covered by each land-use land-cover class in each buffer separately. Then, Shannon’s entropy index was calculated for each buffer zone and dataset. Geomatics tools were used to analyze the historical datasets, which included land-use land-cover maps, population density maps, and proximity maps.