There are several research articles that are available on the web for urban growth detection. Many of them are freely available and the rest can be accessed via an institutional subscription. Landsat is a very popular and widely used freely available satellite data for urban growth monitoring studies. One of the advantages with Landsat is the availability of historical satellite data since 1972, which makes it viable for long term multi-temporal change detection studies. I've added some relevant links which have references within that will be helpful.