Mapping the Land-Use Suitability for Urban Sprawl Using Remote Sensing and Gis Under Different Scenarios

Abstract

Urbanization is one of the important issues in fast developing countries, such as China, Turkey, Brazil, and South Africa. Therefore, sustainable urbanization strategies come into question while designing the cities. In this point, land-use suitability mapping for urban areas is of importance. Spatial information sciences, such as geographical information systems (GIS) and remote sensing are applied widely for mapping landuse suitability. In this study, Van City, which is the most crowded city in eastern Turkey, was evaluated by applying three different scenarios called ecological, economic, and sustainable. The multi-criteria evaluation technique was used in GIS environment in the mapping stage. Distance from roads, distance from urban boundary, hillshade, slope, elevation, land-use cover, and land-use ability factors were used as inputs in the analysis stage. The weights of each input factor were calculated according to urban change dynamics between 2002 and 2015. As a result of the study, the weighting approach using the natural change dynamics of Van City has a great potential to define objective weights. In addition, Van City was developed orderly on agricultural lands and grasslands, and it was not a sustainable development for the region because the main income is still agriculture and animal production, so a new strategy was designed in a sustainable scenario to prevent agriculture and grassland area loss in a mutual benefit between nature and human.