CONCLUSION

Bangalore is in the forefront among rapidly urbanizing citiesin India. The uncontrolled growth has led to the decline of landscape heterogeneity affecting the natural resources as well as local ecology. Visualization of the patterns of urbanisation provides insights required for an effective regional planning to ensure sustainability. The current work in this regard, through Markov based CA modeling predicts the urbanisation patterns in 2012 and compares with the actual growth. As there was a good agreement between the actual and predicted 2012, exercise was extended to predict LU in 2020.

This research demonstrate the applicability of urban growth modeling using Markov chain and CA.  Visualization of likely changes (based on the current pattern of urbanisation) will provide crucial insights necessary to develop and plan for sustainable Bangalore.  In this context, the prediction of homogenous landscape with clumped urban growth by 2020, and the disappearance of ecologically important landscape elements – vegetation, open spaces and water bodies. This necessitates integrated approaches in land use planning to minimize the damage on local ecology and hydrology due to decline of LU other than urban category. The visualized outcome for 2020 highlights the implications of the current lopsided approaches in urban planning. This will lead to further changes in the regional climate; enhance pollutants in air and water, increase of temperature, consequent thriving of disease vectors and loss of vital natural resources. However, the city development plans and policy documents still emphasize the continuation of the current approaches of urban expansion during the next decade. This would only lead to the concrete jungle with polluted environment and scarcity of lifeline (water and clean air) of the city.

Predicted scenario of 2020 reveals that apart from distinct developments driving urbanization in main urban road corridors, there will be spurt in the built-up area in northeast and northwest of Bangalore.  This can be attributed to small towns gaining importance industrially and residentially due to Kempegowda international airport in the region.  This research shows that new urban nuclei will emerge in the next two decades and will be significantly clustered in space, while the outer buffer region will be more fragmented.This endeavor provide invaluable inputs for sustainable city planning. Nevertheless the exercise is fruitful only when bureaucracy - policy makers, urban planners and city managers take note of the implications of poor planning.Further research in progress in this domain focusses on integration of various agents and evaluation of proposed development plans and likely scenario of integrating land use with mobility.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

We are grateful to NRDMS Division, The Ministry of Science and Technology, Government of India and Indian Institute of Science for the financial and infrastructure support.