ANALYSIS OF SPATIAL PATTERNS OF URBANISATION USING GEOINFORMATICS AND SPATIAL METRICS

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.