Urban Influence on Settlement Patterns : A Study of Ahmedabad Metropolitan Region

The evolution of the settlement pattern of any area is governed by a number of forces which vary from one region to another and hence, we get varying patterns in the spatial distribution of settlements. The conventional visual judgment of the settlement pattern as sparse, dispersed, agglomerated or dens has been replaced by more scientific characterization with the help of the nearest neighbour index. Nearest neighbour analysis (NND) helps in distinguishing three kinds of basic distribution of points, namely uniform (even), random and clustered. The problem of nearest neighbour distance analysis is that of finding a single index for any given pattern, running on a continuous scale, i.e. from extreme when all the points are clustered to the other extreme a situation in which all the points are distributed uniformly. In this paper an attempt has been made to discover whether statistically settlements have clustered, random or even distribution in Ahmedabad metropolitan region. The results obtained are then compared with the settlements pattern in Delhi Metropolitan region. The comparison between two regions highlights whether the distribution of settlements in the region under study is general or unique in nature or not