Exploring Spatial Modeling to analyze Urban Growth in Siliguri City, West Bengal, India

Spatial modeling is very crucial in the context of urban growth, which helps to analyze land cover changes in the aspect of space and time. Sustainable urban growth is necessary through the investigation of urban growth, urban expansion, and planned intervention. This research work attempts to take care of urban growth in Siliguri city, West Bengal, India. Temporal Landsat images from 1990, 2000, 2010, and 2020 with 30 m resolution have been used through the CA-Markov chain model, and as a result, the built-up region was 48.868 km2 in 1990, rising to 123.61 km2 in 2020. I.e., the built-up region has been raised continuously, and the vegetation region has been reduced correspondingly. Also, understand the future urban growth; the projection has been done for 2040, which was 139.09 km2 of the urban area. Further, the expansion of urban areas in Siliguri City has been shown through Shannon's entropy model. The outcome shows that Siliguri City's urban growth has been continuously dispersed in nature especially spreading in the NE and NW directions. Later on, using Land Change Modeler the trend of spatial change is highlighted. The results show that non-urban areas convert into urban areas, which indicates that the urban growth of Siliguri city is sporadic and unplanned. Besides the urban growth of Siliguricity, mainly concentrated along the road, extends into the surrounding areas. The study attempts to develop the necessary planning process for urban areas before any intervention is undertaken here. These steps highlighted will help city and urban planners to make sustainable interventions in cities and avoid urban sprawl.