Identifying urban growth patterns through land-use/land-cover spatio-temporal metrics: Simulation and analysis

The spatial pattern of urban growth determines how the physical, socio-economic and environmental characteristics of urban areas change over time. Monitoring urban areas for early identification of spatial patterns facilitates assuring their sustainable growth. In this paper, we assess the use of spatio-temporal metrics from land-use/land-cover (LULC) maps to identify growth patterns. We applied LULC change models to simulate different scenarios of urban growth spatial patterns (i.e., expansion, compact, dispersed, road-based and leapfrog) on various baseline urban forms (i.e., monocentric, polycentric, sprawl and linear). Then, we computed the spatio-temporal metrics for the simulated scenarios, selected the most informative metrics by applying discriminant analysis and classified the growth patterns using clustering methods. Two metrics, Weighted mean expansion and Weighted Euclidean distance, which account for the densification, compactness and concentration of urban growth, were the most efficient for classifying the five growth patterns, despite the influence of the baseline urban form. These metrics have the potential to identify growth patterns for monitoring and evaluating the management of developing urban areas.