CHALLENGES AHEAD

The efficiency of urban settlements largely depends on how well they are planned; how well they are developed economically and how efficiently they are managed. With rapid urbanisation in developing countries, urban sprawl seems inevitable. However, much of the understanding of sprawl in developing countries is still vague. A starting point for this is the development of appropriate indicators for measuring / quantifying urban sprawl in developing countries. It is now imperative to have robust information systems depicting the above said indicators for effective communication, planning, review and monitoring of urban sprawl. Furthermore, such an information system when deployed over the Internet can be made accessible to a wider community with round the clock accessibility.

Combining the goals of achieving sustainability and addressing the problem of sprawl has been the underlying principle of the present description of sprawl indicators for developing countries. This would allow the concerned authorities of urban areas to regularly plan, review and monitor the direction in which urban growth heads towards achieving sustainable development. It is in this spirit the paper also reviewed existing indicator frameworks and arrived at the indicators for urban sprawl. Further, these were operationalised for the city based on both primary and secondary data collection.

The different dimensions of sprawl based on Environment and Resources, Demography and Economy, Mobility, and Planning and Governance were ascertained and enumerated. The utility of spatial indicators combined with non-spatial indicators were useful in characterising the patterns of sprawl across the urban agglomeration. The estimation of different indicators and the subsequent analysis clearly brought out the distinction between the sprawl regions (outer zones) and the central city (central zones). Characterising urban growth using multi-temporal remote sensing data has been quite popular for a while although there have been a few studies that addressed the extent of urban growth resulting in sprawl through appropriate metrics. In this paper the utility of landscape metrics like patchiness and built-up density for characterising urban sprawl was demonstrated. However, a critical challenge is to identify ecologically sensitive habitats (like water bodies) that may be prone to sprawl and address the extent of low-density sprawl that results in inefficient resource usage. Further, the pattern of development, taking place along the periphery of the Bangalore city, should be used as tool for effective monitoring and enhancing management options for land-use.