Evaluating the Dynamics of Urban Expansion and Land Use-Land Cover Change in the Inter-Urban Areas of Barasat and Barrackpore of West Bengal, India

Urban expansion has predominantly occurred in peri-urban areas rather than within the urban core. It is mainly determined by unorganised growth, increased immigration, and rapid population growth in the urban fringe areas. The present paper analyses the trend of urbanisation, the land use and land cover change (LULC), and growth of built-up area in the Barasat-Barrackpore urban areas over the last four decades since 1990. The LULC change was prepared by using the Landsat images for the years of 1990, 2000, 2010, and 2020 by applying the maximum likelihood algorithm of supervised classification with the help of Remote Sensing and GIS techniques in ArcGIS. The four urban landscapes viz. urban core area, peri-urban area, scatter settlements, and open spaces were categorised using the NDBI sprawl matrix for analysing the magnitude and direction of urban growth. It is found that the urban population, urban area and urban units increased by 54%, 32%, and 42%, respectively in the period of 2001- 2011. The built-up area increased in 102.50%, while agricultural, vegetation cover, fallow, and wetlands decreased in 23%, 59%, 60%, and 57%, accordingly. It is also known, by conversion matrix, that agricultural lands have been converted into built-up and fallow lands, vegetative cover into built-up, fallow lands and agriculture, fallow lands into built-up and agricultural, wetlands into fallow lands, agricultural and built-up area, respectively. This study may help the planners and policy-makers for sustainable urban development.