Land Suitability Analysis for Urban Land Use Development

Quiha is rapidly growing sub-city in terms of population and spatial growth in the last two decades. The city is characterized by mixed and conflicting land uses due to lack of adopting proper spatial decision support techniques. The aim of the study is to assess the existing land use and propose a method to facilitate land suitability analysis. Accordingly, the current urban land use of the sub-city was assessed; maps were generated for the possible suitable areas for urban land use development by using GIS and multi-criteria decision analysis. Mainly, seven criteria, i.e. land use/land cover, flood hazards, slope, road proximity, aspect, elevation and distance from the airport were used for the urban land use development. As per the suitability map, the total study area was divided into four different suitability categories such as highly suitable 20%, moderately suitable 19%, low suitable 19% and unsuitable 42%. The suitability map validation was assessed using the techniques of ground truth verification and sensitivity analysis. Finally, the suitability map was compared with the existing land use. Accordingly, 22% of the land from the highly suitable category is already being used for the settlements and military camps, 20% of the land from the low suitable category is being used for settlements, while 58% are classified as forest and reserved from the category of unsuitable. In this suitability analysis study, optimal suitable area for the urban land use development approximately matches with the preferences of the local land use experts. Cite this Article Vanum Govindu, Ataklti G/Selassie. Land Suitability Analysis for Urban Land Use Development. Journal of Remote Sensing & GIS. 2016; 7(2): 27–40p.