Geospatial Assessment of Uncontrolled Urbanization and Its Deviation from an Intelligent City: A Case Study of Fort Portal, Uganda

Uncontrolled urbanization is one of the major geo-environmental challenges facing the developing world today towards attainment of intelligent cities. Various studies have mainly concentrated on impact of uncontrolled urbanization on urban heat island, air quality and housing with little focus on its alteration of urban vegetation cover a major parameter on growth of intelligent cities. This paper uses geo-spatial and remote sensing approaches to assess land cover patterns derived from pixels using maximum likelihood supervised classification of the Landsat data of Fort portal municipality in Uganda using ENVI 5.2 and Arc GIS 10.1. The change detection statistics obtained from land cover transition were analyzed on six years’ interval from 1998 to 2016 basing on the principles of intelligent urbanism. Five major land cover classes - built-up, sparse vegetation, thick vegetation, bare ground and water were obtained. There was an increase in the built-up from 6.89% to 27.38%, bare ground from 12.68% to 39.39% and a decrease of vegetation from 80.42% to 32.4%, almost constant transition from vegetation to built-up of 169.38 Ha (1998-2004), 185.76 Ha (2004-2010) and 139.14 Ha (2010-2016) and a positive transition from bare ground to built-up of 122.31 Ha (1998-2004), 267.66 Ha (2004-2010) and 384.21 Ha (2010-2016). A rapid transition of vegetation cover to built-up is preventing Fort portal from developing into an intelligent city as it is defying the principle of environmental sustainability. The findings can be used as a check point on transition rate of existing land cover to built-up zones in urban areas and to control the radial and linear expansion of towns/ municipalities/ cities using green belts to achieve intelligent cities.