INTRODUCTION

Sustainable cities have become key issue to attain more equitable standards of living both within and among global populations. The development can be achieved without undermining the requirement of future generations of attaining similar standards of living or improved standards. Development is a process of transformation of combining socio-economic growth (Tanguay et al., 2010) and sustainability. This brings to the focus that environmental considerations have to be embedded in all sectors and policy areas. Sustainable urban development entails achieving a balance between the development of the urban areas and protection of the environment with equity in employment, basic amenities, and social infrastructure.Urbanisation isa dynamic process involving the growth of urban population resulting in landuse changes,which is being experienced by most of the developing nations (UNPD, 2005; Barney, 2006; Ramachandra and Kumar, 2010). Urbanisationhas been attributed to the changes in land use/land cover (Raffaella et al., 2011) coupled with thesocioeconomic aspects such as population or density. The rapid and uncontrolled growth of the urbanising cities brings numerous changes in the structure and hence the functioning of landscape (Solon, 2009).

Multi Resolution remote sensingdata acquired through the sensors of Earth Observation Satellites (EOS) provides a synoptic view of the landscape. This temporal data on spatial scale  offers a tremendous advantage over historical maps or air photos, as it provides consistent observations over a large geographical area, revealing explicit patterns of land cover and land use (Lillesand et al, 1987).The increased availability and improved quality of spatial and temporal remote sensing data with the innovative analytical techniques, helps to monitor and analyze urban expansion of large areas in a digital format and land use change and landscape metrics  in a timely and cost-effective way (Haack et al., 1997; Yang et al., 2003, Li and Yeh, 2000).

Landscape metrics also known as spatial metrics are invaluable for understanding and characterizing the urban processes and their consequences. These metrics, based on the geometric properties of the landscape elements, are indicators widely used to measure several aspects of the landscape structure and spatial pattern, and their variation in space and time (Li and Wu 2004). Recently there has been an increased interest in the application of spatial metrics techniques to analysethe landscape dynamics of change ecology and growth process (McGarigal et al., 1995, Zhou, 2000; Luck and Wu, 2002; Li and Yeh, 2000; Dietzel et al., 2005; Porter Bolland et al., 2007; Roy and Tomar, 2001). A variety of landscape metrics have been proposed to characterize the spatial configuration for the individual landscape class or the whole landscape base (Patton, 1975; Forman and Gordron, 1986; Imbernon and Branthomme, 2001; McGarigal et al., 2002; Herold et al., 2003; Li and Wu, 2004; Uuemaa et al., 2009). In this context, spatial metrics are a very valuable tool for planners who need to better understand and more accurately characterize urban processes and their consequences (Herold et al., 2005; DiBari, 2007; Kim and Ellis, 2009). Scaling functions of the multi-resolution data describes the variations of different landscape pattern metrics with spatial resolution (Small, 2001, Saura et al 2007; Yu, 2006; Wu, 2002). Spatial metrics thus helps to categorize landscape diversity and differences of landscape diversity within urban regions.