RESEARCH ARTICLE Measuring Urban Land Use Change and Sprawl Using Geospatial Techniques: A Study on Purulia Municipality, West Bengal, India Chumki Shikary 1 • Somnath Rudra 1 Received: 16 April 2020 / Accepted: 12 October 2020 Ó Indian Society of Remote Sensing 2020 Abstract Population growth, desire for more income, transportation facilities and rural to urban migration have increased the rate of urbanisation and complicated its pattern over Purulia district, West Bengal, India. This situation obstructs the organised and planned urban development provoking the sprawl like phenomenon within the urban locality. As the district belongs to a socio-economic deprived region, most of the researchers mainly concentrate on the physical and socio-economic problems of the district neglecting the scenario of urbanisation over the district. So, the present study is an attempt to assess the urban growth modelling over the Purulia Municipality which is a dominating city in terms of population and urban functions in the district. Images from Landsat-5 Thematic mapper (TM) and Landsat-8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) were used to prepare land use land cover (LULC) maps of 1998, 2008 and 2018. Supervised classification with maximum likelihood classifier was applied. Direction-based relative Shannon’s entropy model has been used for quantification of urban expansion in the last 20 years. The LULC changing condition shows that 65.41% vegetation coverage, 47.63% water body, 31.55% bare land and 10.79% agricultural land have been diminished within this time due to increasing demand for artificial man-made land. Besides, the built-up area has grown by 122% within the 20 years which proved that urban physical expansion is going on over the municipality. The results show that the pattern of urban growth of this municipality is a compact one, and the built-up areas are mostly oriented towards North, North-east, East, South-east and South directions than the other quadrants. Besides, the percentage of built-up area has been rapidly decreasing from CBD to periphery area due to increasing distance. For the planning purpose of balance development in a socio-economic deprived region like Purulia district, the outcomes of this study can best be utilised by the local planners and administrators. Keywords Land use land cover Á Urban sprawl Á Shannon’s entropy Á Urban planning Á Purulia municipality Introduction Urbanisation is considered as a process of development which integrates the modernisation, industrialisation and economic progress of the residents not only within the urban locality but also on the urban fringe areas (Sharma 1985; Bhatta 2010; Garouni et al. 2017). This phenomenon is always encouraging towards the changes of land for awkward utilisation of land resources and energy, and large-scale development of commercial and residential areas. Land use and land cover change plays an essential role to determine the potential use of natural resources, and the ever-increasing demand for land use changes by pop- ulation pressure rises detrimental effect on natural land (Bhattacharya et al. 2020) and agricultural land (Srivastava et al. 2020). Although urban areas cover only 3% of the land surface on the earth, the unplanned urbanisation due to population growth creates environmental and socio-economic issues over the urban space (Liu and Lathrop 2002; Sarvestani et al. 2011) and urban sprawl is one of them. Over time, this sprawling creates different kinds of urban-related problems like poor economic condition, poor quality of drinking water and sanitation problems to the people who are living in the slum and the fringe region (Weber and & Somnath Rudra rudra347@rediffmail.com Chumki Shikary chumkishikaryc1994@gmail.com 1 Department of Geography, Vidyasagar University, Midnapore, West Bengal, India 123 Journal of the Indian Society of Remote Sensing https://doi.org/10.1007/s12524-020-01212-6