The proportion of the global population that lives in towns and cities has risen from one in fifty, two centuries ago, to approximately half of all people today.
This radical shift from rural to urban life is an especially pressing problem for developing nations, such as India, where mega cities with uncontrolled, unauthorised, uncoordinated, and unplanned urban growth – urban sprawl – are discovering serious health and safety problems for their citizens in terms of infrastructure demands, traffic and other pollution, and waste and sewage disposal, as well as the obvious pressures of increased population density and demands on food, water, and other resources.
A team from India is now using a fuzzy classification model to help identify areas that might succumb to problematic urban sprawl. They have tested their model with satellite imagery of the city of Jaipur and demonstrated that critically it can distinguish between urban and semi-urban areas and how urban sprawl is emerging.
Sisodia, P.S., Shekhawat, R.S. and Tiwari, V. (2018) ‘A fuzzy classification model for identification of potential areas of urban sprawl’, Int. J. Society Systems Science, Vol. 10, No. 3, pp.171–181.