Indian urban atlas : mapping the growth and expansion of India's 100 largest cities

Visualising the development and expansion of urban settlements in critical to understanding the nature and dynamics of contemporary Indian urbanisation. The india Urban Atlas is an effort to map the extent of Indur's urbanisation by looking at its hundred largest cities (by population size), and to assess the rate of growth of their built-up environments, since 2001 Building on earlier work by the Indian institute for Human Settlements as well as international studies (HS, 2015, Angel et al, 2016), it tracks urban expansion in rapidly growing urban environments using Landsat 30 m resolution data (USGS, 2016)

The Atlas presents landcover change maps from around the two Census periods (2001 and 2011) and 2017, and a built-up area change map for urban areas over this period. Landcover change of built-up areas, vegetation and water bodies are analysed over this period to enable a better understanding of the relationship between urban growth landcover and regional environmental change. This can be viewed in the context of urban population growth trends since 1951,

The cumulative population of these hundred cities is 203.47 million as of 2017. The total combined area is 17.385.99 square kilometres (0.52 per cent of the territory of India) (Office of the Registrar General & Census Commissioner, India 20111, at a median density of 9,691 persons per square kilometre, which is significantly higher than India's mean density of 398 persons per square kilometre. The mean CAGR of these cities over the period 2011-2017 is estimated at 6.18 per cent.

This is the first contemporary analysis of urban expansion and landcover change in India since 2001. In time, as the Atlas expands to cover a larger share of India's 7,935 urban settlements, it will make it possible to track urbanisation, territorial expansion and the transformation of urban areas within and outside formal administrative boundaries. It will be an invaluable tool for policymakers and urban and infrastructure planners to understand spatial patterns of growth and development and to visualise the potential impact of demographic changes. economic and infrastructure development, land use and planning policies on landcover.