Khushboo Singh
GEOGRAPHY
October 2025
In India's fast expanding cities, urban sprawl has become a major problem that has drastically changed land use, ecological balance, and urban sustainability. Through the integration of multi-temporal Landsat imagery, census data, and GIS-based analytical techniques, this study investigated the spatiotemporal dynamics of urban expansion in Varanasi between 1990 and 2020. A nearly threefold increase in built-up area was found through supervised classification, mostly at the expense of agricultural land. Decadal change detection revealed that urbanization was constant throughout all time periods, with 1990–2000 seeing the biggest shift. Growing Shannon's entropy values (0.62 in 1990 to 0.89 in 2020) quantitatively confirmed the trend of built-up growth shifting from a compact, core-centered pattern to a dispersed peri-urban form, as shown by zonal analysis. Concerns regarding land sustainability, ecological resilience, and future urban planning are raised by the findings, which verify Varanasi's shift towards unplanned, fragmented sprawl. This study's integrated remote sensing, GIS, and entropy-based framework offers a trustworthy method for evaluating sprawl dynamics and crucial information for urban planners and policymakers
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© Airo Journals 2021
