Assessing the Urban Landscape Dynamics over Guwahati Metropolitan Area, India

The process of urbanization has become a dominant phenomenon around the globe. While urbanization is deemed as a development indicator, rapid, unplanned and haphazard urbanization causes tremendous pressure to the natural landscape and surrounding environment. The shifting of capital of Assam, in 1972, from Shillong to Dispur marked the beginning of rapid built-up growth corroborated by unprecedented population rise in Guwahati Metropolitan Area (GMA). In this regard, this paper aims to quantitatively characterize the urban expansion and identify the ongoing land transformation process in GMA. An integrated approach of remote sensing and geographic information system (GIS) techniques, coupled with the Urban Landscape Analysis Tool (ULAT) was employed in the study. Four Landsat imageries for 1976, 1989, 2002 and 2015 were used to produce three major categories of maps: Urbanized area, Urban footprint maps and New development areas. Based on the urbanness of cells, urbanized area and urban footprint maps are derived where seven classes were identified, (i) Urban built-up, (ii) Sub-urban built-up, (iii) Rural built-up, (iv) Urbanized open land, (v) Captured open land, (vi) Rural open land and (vii) water. The new development areas consisted, (i) infill, (ii) extension and (iii) leapfrog. Comparative analyses of these maps were done to record the urban expansion dynamics in the study area.