Assessment of Development Plans for Small Urban Areas of Bangladesh: Remote Sensing and GIS-based Approach

Assessment of development plans particularly in terms of land use and land cover can strategically support conventional land use planning practices. This paper attempts to assess the land cover related proposals mentioned in the development plans of two small urban areas, namely Madaripur and Rajoir of Bangladesh, which are rapidly growing and facing shrinkage of agricultural lands and water bodies by such growth. Land cover data for the study have been extracted from Landsat satellite images of 1995, 2005 and 2015. The classified satellite data have been employed in a Multi-Layer Perceptron Markov model to predict the land cover scenario of the study areas for 2035, the terminal year for the development plans. The proposed development plan and the modelpredicted land cover maps of 2035 are both quantitatively and spatially compared. The study also determines the degree of conformance and identifies the affected sites within respective protected areas. The analysis reveals significant mismatches between the development plans and the model predictions for the unconstrained simulation of the model, whereas fewer differences are observed in the case of guided simulation. The results imply that lack of implementation of the development plans may result in undesired land cover transformations. It recommends employing remote sensing and GIS-based models to support the land-use plan-making process in the development authorities.