Geospatial Technology in Urban Sprawl Assessment

The emergence of alienated patch in the periphery of the city or fragmentation of the main city are the results of irresponsible and poor planning. This global problem of sprawl is strengthening even more with the hasty pace of urbanization. Despite the existing policies and regulations, it is a huge failure to control the sprawl. Hence, city planners and policy makers need to be more efficient in designing the cities to achieve sustainable development goals. For that purpose, adequate and informative data of the urban morphology, growth pattern, sprawl characteristics are required. Geospatial technology is a cost-effective measure and best among currently available techniques for collecting real-time/near real-time geographical data of the entire globe. The geographic information system (GIS) provides numerous tools for assessment of multidimensionality of urban sprawl. This chapter discusses various urban models, different forms of urban expansion, and a few existing methods to quantify sprawl.