Urban Growth Modeling and Land-Use/Land-Cover Change Analysis in a Metropolitan Area (Case Study: Tabriz)

Abstract

During the last three decades, the expansion of the Tabriz Metropolitan Area (TMA) to the surrounding areas has caused the destruction of environmental resources and problems such as disturbing ecological balance, increasing service costs, construction over unsuitable lands, exacerbation of air pollution, and lack of consideration of existing deteriorated textures and previous ongoing trends, reducing the environmental quality of the TMA. The goal of this study was to perform ecological modeling of urban development in the TMA with respect to the preservation of environmental resources, prevention of urban sprawl, and the management of the physical expansion of the TMA in an eco-friendly manner. In this research, to investigate the previous pattern of growth of the TMA, Landsat satellite imagers from 1984 to 2018 were used to discover the non-ecological and sprawl development of the TMA, and artificial neural networks and logistic regression techniques were applied to simulate future development up to 2038. According to information from the Iranian Statistical Center and 34 year of satellite imagery analysis, the population of the TMA increased from 1,007,992 to 1,961,560 during this period. Additionally, urban and rural land area increased from 7220.34 hectares to 27,640.57 hectares. A lack of coordination between population and urban expansion, as well as a decrease of 8513.61 hectares of agricultural and garden lands was inferred from the Holdern model. Detailed Calculations of the Holdern index (sprawl tendency) showed a lack of consideration of urban development capacity with population growth rate, and the Holdern index is equal to 0.6 in Tabriz. For future ecologic development of the TMA, hexagonal blocking of the urbanization probability map was used alongside environmental development policies in the form of using 30 percent of infill development capacities of inefficient land uses to prevent sprawl growth in Tabriz. Additionally, to preserve ecological landscapes, ecological networks in the form of green belts and bows with a length of 91 km were designed that may be effective in preventing the merging of small cities and nearby villages in the Tabriz metropolis.

Prediction of transportation index for urban patterns in small and medium-sized Indian cities using hybrid RidgeGAN model

“…including the transportation system is important for understanding the current urban centers and for planning future city development 2 . Land use and land cover maps become a starting point for modeling urban patterns and they can infer the future urban growth and the direction of land expansion of cities to inform urban planners and government policymakers towards sustainable urban planning 3 – 5 . While urban areas continue to experience rapid growth, they pose new challenges to the nation, especially for developing and underdeveloped countries 6 .…”

Quota and Space Allocations of New Urban Land Supported by Urban Growth Simulations: A Case Study of Guangzhou City, China

“…Compared with The General Land Use Planning, existing studies have focused on space allocation, which has more academic value than quota allocation. Space allocation of urban land is usually conducted through land use change or growth simulation models [20,21]. Urban growth simulations can predict areas that are likely to become urban lands and are widely used for space allocation of new urban land [22,23].…”