Urban Boundary Demarcation—An iCN Model Approach

Abstract

During the last two decades, determining the urban boundaries of cities has become one of the major concerns in the urban and regional planning subject domains. Many scholars have tried to model the change of urban boundaries as it helps with sustainable development, population projections and social policy making, but such efforts have been futile, owing to the complex nature of urbanization and the theoretical and technical limitations of the proposed applications. Hence, many countries continue to rely on the administrative boundary demarcation, which rarely represent the actual urbanizing pattern. In such context, this study utilized the “Intersection-Based Clustered Network Model—(iCN Model)” to determine the urban boundaries of cities and selected Sri Lanka as the study area and considered few cities to test the model empirically, with satellite imagery classified urban boundaries. The findings of the study depict that the iCN Model is capable of capturing the complex and dynamic socioeconomic interdependencies of cities via the transportation network configurations. Therefore, the proposed approach is an excellent proxy to derive the urban boundaries of cities, which correspond with the same, derived by the satellite imageries. The proposed model is entirely based on open-source GIS applications and is free to implement and modify using the methods described in this paper.