Assessing urban development trajectories using landscape expansion metrics and multivariate statistical approaches: evidences from rohtak city, NCR, India

Abstract

Rohtak, which is a major city in the National Capital Region (NCR) of India, has experienced a fast-tracked transformation over the last 40 years as shown by the increased population growth through migration, urban development, and spatial restructuring. The research applies the landscape ecological metrics and the multivariate trajectory analysis to examine the distance and direction specific nature of urban development during 2000–2020, through the Mann-Kendall and Principal Component Analysis (PCA). The findings indicate that there is a high level of anisotropy in the growth patterns with the northern, western and north-western regions recording the highest growth due to the existence of educational hubs, industrial estates and improved transport connectivity leaving the eastern corridor relatively underdeveloped. A distance-gradient analysis suggests that infill saturation occurs between 2 and 4 km of the core, whereas leapfrog and edge-expansion processes occur between 6 and 10km, especially around the larger institutions and the Industrial Model Township. It is possible to identify three phases of urban development: the first fragmented phase (2000–2010), the transitional phase of urban development (2010–2015), and the coalescence phase (2015–2020), which can be characterized by the transition between dispersed urban forms and compact urban forms. Directional heterogeneity is also supported by trajectory metrics, whereby long, linear growth paths are oriented towards the north, southeast and south, and little expansion towards the west. On the whole, Rohtak is a typical ripple-effect urbanisation model, with a shift in the monocentric core to the polycentric, corridor-based growth at the edges. The results provide a critical role of the institutional hubs, industrial estates, and transport infrastructure in determining urban trajectories, hence providing important insights into sustainable urban planning in the fast-growing secondary cities in the NCR.