Forecasting urban expansion of Vadodara City, Gujarat (India): An integrated modeling approach with spatial, economic and demographical parameters

Urbanization is the inevitable phenomenon associated with the development of the region. The cities and towns tend to expand their territory exerting pressure on the environment and resources. Often this growth turns into sprawl, owing to irrational planning policies, coarse data, and generalized approaches irrespective of the underlying characteristics of the region. Thus, the need for urban planners is to understand the impact of past policies and their future course. The spatial urban expansion models like Cellular automata (CA) prove to be effective to trace urban development along with predicting the future. It equips the inclusion of the multiple spatial parameters to understand its degree of influence on regional urbanization. The present study focuses on the prediction of urbanization for 2031 in the Vadodara urban development authority (VUDA) region in Gujarat (India) using the cellular automata model. The study includes multiple variables comprising the social, demography, and land price variation along with the physical and site-situation suitability. A total of 32 years of time series dataset for identification of the land use pattern was generated. The result shows the city of Vadodara predominantly service industries centric growth and having industrial development on the peri-urban stretch will push the city limit to expand and according to the calibrated CA model, around 25 sq. km of the area is going to be transformed into the built-up usage in the VUDA region by the year 2031. The expansion of the built-up cover will mostly transform agricultural land, scrubland, and open land usage. Thus, a balanced horizontal versus vertical growth of the city will be required to have sustainable city development.