Hi,
Respected members, need suggestions for the Ph.D. research topic about Urban growth patterns/planning and future growth prediction using Remote Sensing and GIS techniues?
Your precious suggestions/guidance will be highly appreciated.
Thanks
While researching urban growth patterns and predictions you may attent to the current and prospective urban legislation or political landscape in the country/state/province/municipality of interest. I think that remote sensing could be a good tool to observe what's going on in large field areas, but models of prediction based only in the patterns of these images tend to be quite unaccuracy. You should use remote sensing tools in your research, but do not forget to explore the political legislation and all the social conflicts that may emerge in that urban landscape.
Dear Rahimoon,
There are a lot of scope of using RS & GIS in the field of urban growth & pattern. Aart from using GIS for various mapping using demographic data, you can use urban changes/dynamics by employing RS satellite data. Like, LULC changes, green cover, wetland changes etc. You can use prediction models for future planning and management. There are some articles available related on such issues. You can visit them.
In my humble opinion growth is unpredictable. It can be useful for say 30 years ahead at most. It is much more important to assess whether the said city can successfully deal with change and remain urban, i.e. civilized.
In unpublished research I conducted to model growth (in my case residential growth), the single largest predictor of future growth, using random forest statistical modeling, was existing growth -- where current development already exists. It has been a number of years since I did this work and can't remember all the variables that most routinely ranked as the highest predictors, but things like existing structures and infrastructure (roads, sewer, water) ranked as highly important. I would concur with a previous comment to be mindful about how far into the future good predictions can be made.
Remote sensing is the best tool to study urban growth & pattern, with a good choice of satellite data (Landsat, sentinel...) and methods ( classifications, index, prediction models...)
Well, I think that the technical features are helpful for measuring unplanned growth like in informal settlements. But for planned growth, economical development, planning intentions of the local authority and environmental possibilities (enough water i.e.) are more important.
The quality/accuracy in the prediction of future urban growth and patterns depends on some main multisector factors as: tendencies of land use/occupation, comparative price of land conditions/characteristics, specific land investment demands, long/medium term development model, comparative grade of infrastructure/services and access provision, among others.
However, all prediction is mostly sensitive to the interests of decision makers and the unpredictable logic that occurs among the games of stakeholders involved. Thus, it depends basically on the quality of urban policies, current local practices, policy enforcement, values and grade of political incidence of the very citizens as a whole.
Depending on the city that you choose for analysis, you may find difficult to access historical images to analyze the process of urban growth and changes in land use
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