Dynamics of Urban Sprawl: Mapping the Changing Faces of Gurugram
摘要
Gurgaon, currently Gurugram city, has seen rapid urbanization in the last two decades and is still expanding owing to an increase in business opportunities. The city’s population grew from 876,969 in 2001 to 1,514,432 in 2011, with the current population being around 1.7 million and projected to be 6.9 million by 2031. The city, being a suburb of the capital, has become an IT hub, luring visitors from all around the nation and beyond, thus engulfing the vegetation. This urban sprawl in the city has exploited the natural resources and done alarming harm to the natural topography, gulping the natural drains and bunds. It has taken a severe toll on the breathing lungs or the forest cover of the city. Using satellite imagery and temporal data, the research attempts to analyze the pattern, extent, and environmental effects of urban sprawl, focusing on four layers: water bodies, built/urban areas, green/agricultural land, and barren/unclassified territory. This research can be used to analyze the growth pattern, the layers of the landscape, natural topography, slopes, drainage patterns, etc., and can eventually be used by town planners, landscape architects and architects for efficient further planning of the city as it currently faces a lot of issues like urban flooding, loss of biodiversity, depleting ground water table, loss of vegetative cover, loss of man-made bunds and drains of the city. In order to learn from this metropolitan city’s fallacies, there is a dire need to study and map the loss in agricultural land, open green areas and surface drains to quantify the urban sprawl impacts. In this study, an attempt has been made to monitor the decadal loss in green/agricultural, water bodies and barren/unclassified lands from 1990 to 2018 by using satellite data of Landsat-6 (1990), Landsat-7 (2000), Landsat-8 (2010) and Landsat-9 (2020), classification of the data into four categories and concluding with change analysis.