Role of GIS Technology, Spatial Data Analysis, and Remote Sensing in Urban Planning

Abstract

This paper has discussed how the Geographic information system (GIS) technology, spatial data analysis and remote sensing can be used in the planning process of an urban area using Faisalabad, Pakistan as a case study, as one of the fastest growing metropolitan regions in South Asia. The main objectives were to identify and measure urban land-use change and spatial expansion over the period 2000-2023 in Faisalabad through multi-temporal satellite data; to perform overlay, buffer, and spatial clustering data to determine the relationship between population density, land-use distribution, and infrastructure provision; and to show how the evidence-based urban planning and sustainable city development could be enhanced by integrated geospatial frameworks. The secondary spatial data were compiled based on NASA Landsat missions and European Space Agency Sentinel program with land-use maps, population distribution data, shapefiles of transportation network and administrative boundary data as supplements. The QGIS and Python included GeoPandas, Rasterio and PySAL spatial analysis library packages to run GIS processing and spatial analysis. Supervised land-use and land-cover maps were created with the help of Maximum Likelihood Classification of Landsat 8 imagery, and the time-series analysis based on the NDBI and NDVI was to measure the trends of urbanization. The overlay analysis showed that by 2023, a total of 2000 urban fringe agricultural land had been developed to built-up purposes with about 38.4 percent of the total land on this urban fringe developed. Buffer study of the primary road corridors indicated that 74.2 percent of new urban development was being experienced within 1.5 km to the existing arterial roads, which affirmed an expansion pattern of linearity and of a corridor-based growth. The statistics of spatial clustering revealed seven high-density population clusters that were statistically significant in central and eastern Faisalabad. It was found that GIS and remote sensing technologies offer invaluable analytic tools in identifying, tracking and predicting urban growth as well as that their integrated intake into the planning institutions in Faisalabad is the key solution to the delivery of sustainable and equitable urban growth.