Ahmedabad’s Urban Sprawl Threatens City’s Sustainable Development
A study of Landsat images of four decades (1974-2017) by a team of geographical Information experts has predicted that at the current rate of growth, urban land will cover the maximum part of the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) area by 2027. The study by Gujarat government’s Bhaskaracharya Institute for Space Applications and Geoinformatics (BISAG) and Central University of Gujarat (CUG) has claimed that the city’s built-space is growing at an unsustainable rate. It claims this rapidly growing urban sprawl is a potential threat to the city’s sustainable development. Before 2007, urban land in the city was growing at about 2.6 sq km per decade. But between 2007 and 2017 the growth of urban land jumped by 132% to reach 6 sq km per decade. The study found that while agricultural land, open spaces and water bodies in the city have shrunk dangerously, densely built forms have grown by 157 sq km during the studied period. The most worrying aspect, the study found, is that water bodies in the city are shrinking rapidly at a rate of 1.57 sq km per decade due to pollution and dumping of wastes. “The predicted urban land use growth reveals that builtup spaces will cover the maximum part of the AMC area by 2027, provided that the present land use trend, demographic growth, and commercial development does not show any major change,” the study has claimed. While conducting this study the GIS experts mapped prominent land-use classes in AMC area including dense-urban, sparseurban, open spaces, green areas (parks and gardens) and visited and recorded them.
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