Huygens’s Principle for Dynamic Urban Growth

Abstract

Successful management of urban areas requires continuous improvement in knowledge related to its underlying processes. The present study proposes a novel technique for analyzing urban boundary expansion. The analysis using remote sensing data at various sampled times of development shows that each point in the boundary has a forward flux outwardly from the developed region. Such behavior allows the use of Huygens’s principle of wavefront propagation to study dynamic boundary expansion and its drivers. A simplified urban region near Mumbai city is taken to implement the method. The urban boundaries are extracted using Landsat satellite data for three periods—1999, 2009 and 2019. The extracted boundaries are smoothened and discretized into fifty equal sections. The discretized points act as the source of Huygen circles used to capture the rate of change in the magnitude and direction of urban boundaries. A regression analysis is used to relate the expansion rates to the potential driver variables. Results show that whereas the change in magnitude is likely to occur closer to highways and toward the nearby city center, it is expected to spread away from the railway stations due to the lack of space closer to them. The proposed technique opens up new avenues of research in urban studies.

Key Words:

• dynamic growth
• geographic information system introduction
• Huygens’s principle
• remote sensing
• urban growth

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pushkin Kachroo

PUSHKIN KACHROO is the Lincy Chair Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Nevada Las Vegas, Las Vegas, NV 89154. E-mail: [email protected]. His research interests include theoretical and applied feedback control; networks and complex data-driven secure systems; nonlinear and hybrid control systems; intelligent transportation systems; traffic and vehicle control; statistics and random processes; mechatronics; robotics; distributed parameter systems; differential geometric methods; and feedback control in E-marketing, education, and learning.

Samarth Y. Bhatia

SAMARTH Y. BHATIA is a PhD Research Scholar in the Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India. E-mail: [email protected]. His research interests include transportation planning, urban planning, and pedestrian facility evaluation.

Gopal R. Patil

GOPAL R. PATIL is a Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India. E-mail: [email protected]. His research interests include transportation systems planning, network optimization, freight transportation modeling, and traffic operations.