Urbanization and Quality of Urban Environment Using Remote Sensing and GIS Techniques in East Delhi-India

Abstract

An explosive increase of urban population, practically in all major cities and towns, has the consequent strain on the existing system manifested in an environmental chaos. The phenomena of accelerated urbanisation is the main culprit, wherein besides bringing higher standard of living, it has also brought problems, as growth of dense and unplanned residential areas, environmental pollution, non-availability of services and amenities, solid waste etc. Remote sensing satellite data is suitable for urban land use mapping to get detail and upto-date information for environmental management. Where as GIS helps in developing database system for urban information, which supports decision making process. Development of digital database on all aspects of land use and urban planning is the next crucial task for the future in which remote sensing based information is going to play a major role. In Delhi, rise in population and growth in economic activity has led to environmental degradation. With this view an attempt has been made to study the quality of urban environment in the East district of Delhi, which is experiencing very high urban growth with 98.75% urban population in 2001. For this study Landsat ASTER (MSS) data of year 2001 (15 m Ground resolution), Guide map of the year 1982 and demographic and environmental data has been used. Eight parameters were selected, which affect the urban environmental quality, namely built-up area, open spaces, household density, occupancy ratio, population density, accessibility to roads, noise and smell affected area. The study shows that the quality of environment has been degraded when we compare 1982 and 2003 data. Most of the East district was in a better state of environment in 1982, but in 2003 things have been changed and now 50% area is in very good, fair and desirable condition. The public participation and involvement should be encouraged planning and decisions making for the improvement in better urban environmental quality.

Slums from Space—15 Years of Slum Mapping Using Remote Sensing

“…The potential application areas for RS-based information on the morphology and temporal dynamics of slums are grouped into four major domains (Table 3, [21,54,77,120,[138][139][140][141][142][143][144][145][146][147][148][149][150][151][152]): economy, environment, governance and planning, and social applications. These domains reflect the reported spatial information needs and lack of information on slums in locally available data sets [84].…”

“…Quite a rich body of literature is connected to social issues, where "remotely sensed imagery can serve as data source for inferring socio-economic variables" ( [93], p. 69). Emerging applications areas are related to land management [144,145], quality of life and crime studies [151,152]. …”

An Investigation of GIS Overlay and PCA Techniques for Urban Environmental Quality Assessment: A Case Study in Toronto, Ontario, Canada

“…However, most public services, public transportation and jobs are located within walking distance from high density areas. Remote sensing technique can aid in determining the density values by extracting the urban areas from the image [8,12]. The extracted urban areas can be divided by the total areas, so as to calculate the building density, as shown in Equation (10).…”

“…Many studies in UEQ justified that open spaces and open green areas are significant factors contributing to high environmental quality areas [8,12]. That is mainly because open spaces and parks offer a healthy and comfortable environment by cooling down the LST and reducing the air pollution especially in high density areas.…”

Urban cadastres for urban land governance

“…the output of policies). More specifically, various works illustrate the utility of remotely sensed imagery for analysis of urban environmental impact assessment (Rahman et al 2011), cadastral data updating (Ali et al 2012), informal settlement analysis (Dubovyk et al 2011, Hofmann et al 2008, Owen and Wong 2013, and urban land use mapping (Hu and Wang 2012). However, none of these studies are explicitly linked with urban land governance 13 .…”