A Comparative Analysis of Temporal Changes in Urban Land Use Resorting to Advanced Remote Sensing and GIS in Karaj, Iran and Luxor, Egypt

As many developing countries, Iranian and Egyptian cities are growing in population and physically expanding at a high rate. The uncontrolled scattered construction causes loss of orchards, agricultural lands as well as spatial chaos, traffic congestion and increasing costs of municipal services. As a consequence, this also induces a loss of identity and social characteristics of neighborhoods, poor quality of life and degradation of natural landscapes, etc. To face with these issues, it is important to quantify trend and the rate of land cover conversion in order to support plan for a rational land use policy. The main purpose of this research is to set up low cost and reliable tools useful for the monitoring of the urban growth. In this paper, multi-temporal satellite data (Landsat TM 1984, Landsat TM 1998 and L8 2016) have been analyzed for investigating and assessing the effects of the urban expansion in Karaj (Iran) and Luxor (Egypt). According to the results obtained from change detection analysis, both of the investigated sites clearly exhibit an increasing trend in urban expansion much more evident in the case of Luxor than Karaj area. The integration between remote sensing and GIS and the joint use of analytical methods for quantitative-qualitative assessment enable the identification of changes and the mapping of new planned and unplanned urban construction. The availability of timely information free available from NASA web site and the data processing herein adopted provide useful information for supporting planning and sustainable developing policies.