Delineation Of Sprawl
As the concept of the sprawl is complex and complicated, its delimitation is even more complicated. It requires a multi- point data. The oldest possible data is taken as the base and successive expansion are superimposed in chronological order. . However, there are many studies to demarcate the limits of urban sprawl or rural urban fringe. Sinha (1980) in his study delineated the fringe area of Patna on the basis of four factors like time taken to reach the administrative (M.C.) boundary, number of daily commuters come in all seasons, milk and vegetable supply to city from surrounding areas, and easy accessibility to city.
Sirvastava and Ramachandran (1974) demarcate the fringe of Delhi and worked out a STAGE MODEL depicting various stage of which village around a metropolis may pass through and ultimately is urbanized. They have suggested heterogeneous factors that are responsible for formation of fringe in Delhi.
Deshpande (1973) in his study on urban sprawl has adopted a quantified technique for the delimitation of urban sprawl. It is based on certain observations, like the built up land at the fringe of the city which is not apart by more than 0.5 km from suburban milk booths. To establish this fact an exercise is carried out and this distance is arrived at by walking from milk booths at fringe to the last house up to 0.5 kms radial distance. If there was any house found within this distance the ride was extended to by another 0.5 km. However, there were very few cases where the house (built up land) was found beyond 1-km radius. Hence, a distance of 0.5 km between the two nearest built up area is incorporated into the main built up land. Any area, which is beyond 0.5 km distance, has been omitted. Hence, standardization has been achieved in the delineation of the urban areas to identify the sprawl that makes the study of urban growth a little more precise, and it eliminates the undesirable human bias. Here after the distance that separates an urban area from its fringe will be termed as sprawl limit.
In the present study the city is delimited by super imposition of series of maps from 1971 to 2001. It is covering several important factors like villages merged in the city in different period of time, build up area, process of urban sprawl, changing occupational structures, sites for industrial establishments and the limits of the essential services etc.