Analysis of Urban Land Use and Residential Site Selection Using Geospatial Technology in Gondar City, Amhara, Ethiopia.

Abstract

Land suitability analysis is crucial for sustainable urban development. This study attempted to analysis urban expansion and suitable residential site selection using geospatial technology. Cross-sectional research design with the application of qualitative and quantitative data analysis approaches were employed. Primary and secondary data were also utilized. Sentinel-2 image, DEM, soil data, and other polyline, point and polygon data were used for this study. Sub pixel supervised classification technique, random forest classifier as algorism, and Google Earth Engine (GEE) as a programming language was used for current land use analysis. GIS based multi-criteria suitability analysis using Fuzzy membership function as data standardizer, Fuzzy overlay as techniques and ―Fuzzy And‖ as algorithms were used for residential area site selection. The result of the study revealed that the land use of the study area indicated 34.20% built-up, 53.24% cultivated land, 12.37% vegetation and 0.08% water body. This implies that there was high potential land in cultivated land for further urban expansion including housing development. The suitability analysis showed that, from the total area of the city, 4.14% was most suitable, 25.19% suitable, 39.75% less suitable, and 30.92% was unsuitable for residential area development. Here, it could be concluded that 29.33% of the total area (both suitable and most suitable area) was recommended for residential area development. The comparative analysis also indicated that 81.18 km2 was part of the city but omitted in the structural plan, and 33.84 km2 was beyond the city administration but considered as part of the city. Moreover, 64.10 km2 residential sites were overlapped, and the remaining 2.63 km2 in the structural plan and 26.78 km2 from the newly identified sites were remaining in gap. This was occurred because of boundary gap, and the way of deciding best sites for specific use. As a final, the qualitative analysis show that even if Ethiopia has been adopted different urban land use policy in different time, there no strong legal frameworks to realistic the land use policy. Therefore, policy makers should concern to formulate feasible land use policy with defined legal frameworks including standards and manuals. Urban planners and local government should also amend the current structural plan, and should use multi-criteria decision method to assign urban land use.