Spatial Monitoring of Urban Expansion Using Satellite Remote Sensing Images: A Case Study of Amman City, Jordan

Hussam Al-Bilbisi
Additional contact information
Hussam Al-Bilbisi: Geography Department, The University of Jordan, Amman 11942, Jordan

Sustainability, 2019, vol. 11, issue 8, 1-14

Abstract: Amman, the capital city of Jordan, faces urbanization challenges and lacks reliable data for urban planning. This study is aimed at assessing, monitoring, and mapping urban land cover using multitemporal Landsat satellite images. Four different land use/cover maps were produced; periods of over ten years between 1987 and 2017 (i.e., in 1987, 1997, 2007, and 2017) were used to evaluate and analyze urban expansion visually and quantitatively. Supervised classification technique followed by the post classification comparison change detection approach was used to analyze images. Over the past three decades, the urban area has increased rapidly in Amman. It increased by 90.78 km 2 , from 149.08 km 2 in 1987 to 237.86 km 2 in 2017, with an average annual rate of increase of 2.03%. Urban area increases were significantly higher in the first 10 years of the study period (i.e., from 1987 to 1997), during which the average annual rate of increase reached 3.33%, while it was 2.04% for the last two decades of the study period (i.e., from 1997 to 2017). Urban growth in Amman generally occurred along transport routes away from the core of Amman, and as a result, this growth led to the expansion of urban areas into other types of land use/cover classes, particularly vegetation areas. The spatial analysis of urban expansion and trends of urban growth in Amman could provide the required input data for the urban modeling of the city.

Keywords: Amman; urban expansion; Landsat; remote sensing; Jordan (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/8/2260/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/8/2260/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:11:y:2019:i:8:p:2260-:d:222904

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().