Geo-informatics Based Land Use / Land Cover Analysis of Chandigarh City

Urban Land use study is important for urban planning and management. Urban areas are facing serious problem of land use management because the knowledge of land use pattern helps to develop strategies to balance the conservation & developmental pressure on urban land resources. This study demonstrates the potential of geospatial technologies as a Decision Support System (DSS) in analysing the cohesiveness of Chandigarh city. The study was carried out by using Google earth imagery of 2010 using on screen visual analysis of land use pattern. The land use features were prepared in Arc GIS vector form which is used for identifying the various classes of urban land use. The result shows that Chandigarh being a planned city has 36 percent under residential purpose and in this area under built up is only 10 percent and rest 25 percent is open areas within built up land. The both commercial & industrial land use categories equally covers less than three percent each and area under vacant land and forest cover about 12percent and 6 percent respectively. It is evident from study that even being a planned city it is facing number of problems like roads & parking, slums, pollution and lack of infrastructure and requirement of spatial expansion for different land uses to meet the continuous increasing demand of increasing population.