Conclusion

Karnataka government’s current focus to develop tier 2 cities in order to decongest major cities, has posed  a  challenge  as unplanned developmental activities is leading to urban sprawl impinging basic amenities to the common man in the outskirts. Availability of spatial data since 1970’s has aided in the temporal land use dynamics. Spatial metrics in conjunction with the density gradient approach have been effective in capturing the patterns of urbanization at local levels.  The techniques would aid as decision-support tools for unraveling the impacts of classical urban sprawlpatterns in Mysore. A set of spatial metrics describing the morphology of unplanned areas have been extracted along with temporal land uses. The extracted indices have indicated the areas of high likelihood of ‘unplannedness’ considering the three dimensions (size/density/pattern).

Land use assessed for the period 1973 to 2009 using Gaussian maximum likelihood classifier highlight that there has been a significant increase (514%) in urban area, with consequent reduction in vegetation cover. Built up density was minimal and the value ranges from 0.026 (considering 3km buffer) to 0.036 (without considering 3km buffer) in the North east direction (in 1973). Shannon entropy computed using temporal data illustrates that Mysore city is experiencing the sprawl in all directions as entropy values are closer to the threshold. Spatial metrics at landscape level reveal that the landscape had a highly fragmented urban class and started clumping to form a single square in late 90’s especially in NE and NW direction in all circle and few inner circles in SE and SW directions, conforming to the other landscape metrics.

Local urban and rural planners need to put forward effective implementable adaptive plans to improve basic amenities in the sprawl localities. Temporal land use analysis along with urban density gradient across four directions has helped in visualising the growth along with the cultural and industrial evolution.