IN-PERSON Barcelona Livable Cities. Section A
Abstract
Urban sprawl poses a persistent challenge to sustainable urban development, often leading to inefficient use of land resources and environmental degradation. To address this issue, the Victorian Government introduced an Urban Growth Boundary (UGB) in Melbourne in 2002 as a part of the Melbourne 2030: Planning for Sustainable Growth strategy, a long-term vision for compact city development. UGB is a planning mechanism that limits development beyond designated boundaries, enabling controlled and compact urban growth. This submission evaluates the effectiveness of UGB in managing urban sprawl across the Melbourne Metropolitan Area between 2000 and 2020. The study utilises multi-temporal Landsat satellite imagery from 2000 (Landsat 7), 2010 (Landsat 5), and 2020 (Landsat 8) to extract built-up areas using Normalised Difference Built-up Index (NDBI). Shannon’s relative entropy was employed to assess the spatial distribution of built-up areas across 31 Local Government Areas (LGAs). The entropy values range from 0 (complete concentration ) to 1 (complete dispersion), offering a measure of spatial dispersion over time. The findings reveal a steady increase in spatial dispersion, with the entropy values rising from 0.84 in 2000 to 0.85 in 2010 and 0.88 in 2020. This suggests that urban growth has deviated from the compact development model intended by the UGB, leading to greater urban sprawl. Though focused on Melbourne, the study offers broader insights into the limitations of UGBs. Using Shannon’s entropy analysis, this research provides empirical evidence on the limitations of the UGB and underscores the importance of data-driven approaches for sustainable urban planning.
Kriti Pradhan is a Joint PhD researcher at the University of Melbourne and KU Leuven. She holds a Master of Science in Urban Planning (2017) and a Bachelor of Architecture (2015) from the Institute of Engineering, Tribhuvan University, Nepal. Her research centres on sustainable development, urban sprawl, urban morphology, and urban planning, with a commitment to advancing strategies for sustainable city development.
Prof. Abbas Rajabifard is an internationally recognised scholar and geospatial engineer and is an active leader in modern land administration systems, sustainability and resilience. He is the Discipline Leader of Geomatics, Associate Dean Sustainability, and Leader of the Future Infrastructure Research Program at the Faculty of Engineering and IT, University of Melbourne. He directs the Centre for Spatial Data Infrastructures and Land Administration (CSDILA). He serves on the UN Academic Network for Global Geospatial Information Management and the UN Advisory Committee for the Global Geospatial Knowledge and Innovation Centre.
Jagannath Aryal received his Ph.D. in optimization and systems modeling from the Centre for Advanced Computational Solutions (C-fACS), Lincoln University, New Zealand, in 2010. He is an Associate Professor in Digital Infrastructure Engineering at the Faculty of Engineering and IT, University of Melbourne. He serves as Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing and leads the GIS, Digital Analytics, and Remote Sensing (GDARS) Area of Practice Committee in Australia. His research applies Earth Observation, geo-information, and geo-statistics in object recognition and geospatial situational awareness.
Prof. dr. ir. Joep Crompvoets is a full professor and research manager at the KU Leuven Public Governance Institute (Belgium) holding the chair on ‘Information Management in the Public Sector’, Vice-President research of EuroSDR (a European spatial data research network linking national mapping agencies with research institutes/universities for the purpose of applied research in the domain of geospatial information management), and founder of Erasmus+ Mundus Joint Master on public sector innovation and e-governance (PIONEER) together with Tallinn University of Technology (Estonia) and Muenster University (Germany). His expertise refers to (spatial) data infrastructures, smart cities, digital twins, and data governance.
11:30 am - 1:00 pm
Friday 18th July, 2025