Land use change trends of Indian cities: a bird's eye view - vulnerabilities of unplanned urban growth

India is projected to be the most populous country on earth by 2024 and is expected to add another 375 million urban dwellers by 2050 to its present 440 million (UN World Population Prospects, 2017). One of the important outcomes of urbanization is dynamically evolving city forms as land use pattern changes in and around urban areas over time. These land-use changes have impacts on the natural and socio-economic functions within a city; and flooding, heat islands, local air pollution, and adverse health impacts occur. For instance, city anatomy containing buildings, roads, infrastructure, and other paved areas could act as barriers for rainwater to percolate into the ground and also travel freely to water bodies and beyond, leading to increased runoff and flooding. Land-use changes could also impact transportation patterns and choices of transportation modes in a city, thus defining travel behavior, energy-vehicle mix, and local air pollution. These in turn could alter a city’s resilience and livability over time. This book studies the urban land-use patterns over 1991-2017 for 47 Indian cities covering climatic zones and size-classes in order to understand the larger picture of urbanization patterns in India. The methodology is internationally benchmarked and uses high-resolution satellite images for 1991, 2001, 2011, and 2017 at 30-meter x 30-meter resolution for each city. These cities are Agra, Agartala, Ahmedabad, Allahabad, Amritsar, Asansol, Aurangabad, Bangalore, Bhopal, Chandigarh, Chennai, Dehradun, Delhi, Dhanbad, Durg-Bhilai Nagar, Faridabad, Gangtok, Ghaziabad, Guwahati, Hyderabad, Indore, Jabalpur, Jaipur, Jodhpur, Kanpur, Kochi, Kolkata, Kota, Lucknow, Ludhiana, Madurai, Mumbai, Mysuru, Nagpur, Nashik, Panaji, Patna, Pune, Rajkot, Shimla, Srinagar, Surat, Tiruchirappalli, Vadodara, Varanasi, Vasai-Virar and Visakhapatnam. The land uses are classified into Agriculture, Built-up, Urban green spaces, Urban open spaces, Forest, Water bodies, and Rivers. The book presents our analysis on the land use data to infer on the state of urban growth situation through the creation of a change matrix for each city. The general trend observed being that agricultural land is reducing, the built-up area is increasing, green and open spaces are going down, and the construction in low-lying areas is growing. The urban built spaces have increased from an average of 25.4 percent to 48 percent, while the agricultural land has reduced from an average of 32 percent to 18.5 percent over 1991-2017. The green spaces and open spaces have also reduced on an average from 16 percent to 12 percent, and 13 percent to 9 percent respectively. The book provides high-resolution estimates for each of these land uses for the 4 snapshot years for each of the 47 cities. The accuracy ranges from 79 to 93 percent. This study provides a very high-resolution land use database for cities upon which many socio-economic studies could be built, such as smart city planning, city rejuvenation and urban transformation, local air pollution distribution, solar rooftop mapping, settlement patterns and equity, the vulnerability of cities to extreme weather events such as rainfall and heatwaves, planning and enhancing urban commons, land price projections, and urban transport.