Monitoring and modeling of urban sprawl through remote sensing and GIS in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Kuala Lumpur is currently experiencing a large-scale urban transformation. This study explores a multi-buffer ring method to investigate the spatial and temporal dynamics of urban growth in the Kuala Lumpur metropolitan area by using Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and remote sensing imageries from1989 to 2014. The first Landsat images from 1989, 2001, and 2014 were classified with maximum likelihood classification to produce land cover maps and identify four types of land cover: urban/built-up, agriculture, forest, and water. Then, the area coverage for all the land use types at different points in time were measured and combined with distance from the city center. Later on, urbanization densities from the city center to the outside for every 1-km distance from 1 to 50 km are calculated. City density on the distance of 5, 8, 15, 20, and 30 km was very high in the years 1989 and 2014. Temporally, urban expansion shows fast and slow growth stages with high-speed growth shifting to the east side of the city. In general, the population, traffic conditions, industrialization, and policy are the major factors thatinfluenced the urban expansion