Identification and Monitoring the Change of Land Use Pattern Using Remote Sensing and GIS: A Case Study of Dhaka City

Dhaka is one of the fastest growing megacities of the world with a dense population over 15 million. Being the capital of a developing country like Bangladesh, it is experiencing multi-dimensional problems such as over urbanization, traffic congestion, water logging, solid waste disposal, black smoke from brick kilns and industrial emissions, sound pollution, pollution of water bodies by industrial discharge and the newly added calamity, building collapse. Dhaka is a sheer example of having poor legislative actions, inefficient management and lack of public awareness, which leads the urbanization to an unplanned and resource consuming development. This paper presents an integrated study of urbanization trends in Dhaka City, Bangladesh, by using Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and Remote Sensing (RS). This study explores the land use change pattern of Dhaka City Corporation over 1990-2010, through interactive supervised land cover classification using Landsat images by ArcGIS 10. The remotely detected land use/cover change from 1990 to 2010 shows that Dhaka is gradually changing as vegetative cover and open spaces have been transformed into building areas, low land and water bodies into reclaimed built up lands. These changes are mainly governed by unplanned urban expansion.