PERI-URBANISATION, LAND-USE DYNAMICS AND LIVELIHOOD DIVERSIFICATION IN URBAN FRINGE OF AGRA AND VARANASI CITIES

Abstract

As bustling hubs of diverse economic and cultural activities, urban centers have drawn in residents from rural areas, leading to the swift expansion of cities. This rapid urban growth on the edge of the town has resulted in a complex zone between urban and rural areas, as expanding cities progressively encroach upon surrounding agricultural and residential land, which possess distinct economic and cultural characteristics divergent from the urban and rural environment. This complex zone, known as the urban fringe, influences livelihood, land-use patterns, economic development, rural migration, infrastructure, environmental degradation, and planning while making government policies. According to UN-DESA (2018), India is expected to face rapid urbanisation by 2050, resulting in several landscape management challenges, such as agricultural land degradation, biodiversity loss, ecosystem services decline, and climate change vulnerability, especially in the transition zone between urban and rural. To address the challenges of urban fringe, it is necessary to have proper demarcation criteria of these zones as the government of India doesn’t define urban fringe zones administratively. Since fringe is a complex zone with a dynamic nature, providing a universal method or criteria for its demarcation is not easy. However, scholars attempted to demarcate or identify urban fringe by developing some methods such as fuzzy urban, land cover information entropy, amalgamated sprawl index, impervious surface area and wavelength integration. Nevertheless, these attempts exhibit limitations, lack of universality in approach, region-specific limitations based on the adopted methods, regional variability, reliance on e geospatial data, ignoring socioeconomic indicators and highly regional and limited to selected cities. This thesis addresses above-mentioned issues in three facets. First delineation of urban fringe using geospatial and socioeconomic indicator and analysis. Second, analysis of land-use dynamics and peri-urbanisation pattern. Third, exploration of livelihood dynamics with perceptions of residents regarding transforming urban fringe. Current work carries out mentioned-facets in urban fringe of Agra and Varanasi metropolitan cities, situated two economically diverse regions of Uttar Pradesh, India. The findings of this research work reveal that the geospatial approach, in conjunction with socioeconomic indicators, offers a suitable method for delineating the urban fringe. The results disclose that VIIRS Night-time lights are positively correlated with built-up land and accessibility to major roads, constituting 23 percent of the total weights in the AHP pair-wise matrix (0.233). The Euclidean distance from the streets (EU distance) accounts for 35 percent of the total weights in the AHP multi-criteria analysis. EU distance carries the highest weight among the various variables, while the remaining variables exhibit a decreasing or increasing pattern along the major roads of the cities. Concerning other determinants, non-agricultural workers (NAWs) emerge as one of the primary factors in delineating the urban fringe. NAWs are closely associated with activities other than agriculture, which are predominantly urban-centric. This association makes them a significant factor in the delineation of the urban fringe, with AHP matrix weights amounting to 16 percent. Other indicators, such as population density and built-up land, contribute 10 percent and 7.9 percent, respectively, to the total weights. Our research findings unveil a notable pattern in population density within the Agra urban fringe. Unlike Varanasi urban fringe, population density in Agra exhibits a strong correlation with the spatial distribution of major roads. The evaluation reveals that education and sex ratio play a relatively minor role in identifying the urban fringe, with weights of 2.5 percent and 4 percent, respectively. Traditionally, rural areas have exhibited lower education levels than urban areas. However, in the context of the urban fringe, close proximity of educational institutions from urban fringes diminishes the disparity in literacy rates. Consequently, the education level becomes less influential in distinguishing the urban fringe from surrounding areas. On the other hand, the sex ratio, with a weight of 0.04, has commonly been considered a significant determinant in delineating the urban fringe. However, our findings indicate that the sex ratio does not significantly contribute to decision-making. Despite its conventional use, it does not hold substantial weight in our specific context of identifying the urban fringe.