Spaces & Flows: Ninth International Conference on Urban and ExtraUrban Studies

Abstract

In recent decades, the world has experienced unprecedented urban growth. In 2015, close to 4 billion people — 54 per cent of the world’s population — lived in cities and that number is projected to increase to about 5 billion people by 2030. Rapid urbanization has brought enormous challenges, including growing numbers of slum dwellers, increased air pollution, inadequate basic services and infrastructure, and unplanned urban sprawl, which also make cities more vulnerable to disasters. Better urban planning and management are needed to make the world’s urban spaces more inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable. As of May 2017, 149 countries were developing national-level urban policies. For over the last forty decades Chennai have constantly grown like any other cities in India. But the reason it stands out from the rest is due to the “sprawl” that has led to devastating effects. This paper assesses the land use land cover change and urban growth in Chennai city and characterizes the patterns of development after liberalization of Indian economy. Mapping of land use and land cover is vital as the contributing factors for the land change can be witnessed with relevant reasons. The adaptation of methodology would characterize the spatiotemporal urban growth patterns and highlight the relationships between urban dynamics and ecological security of the Chennai city. For this purpose, supervised classification technique is applied to Land sat images acquired from 1990 to 2017 with interval of four to five years. The percentage change of built-up just doubled during the study period.