Urban sprawl evolution and soil artificialization assessment by using satellite data from 1985 to 2019: case of El Jadida metropolitan in Morocco

Urban planning, a technical and political process related to land use and the design of the urban environment, emerged to meet the economic and social demands of the population. Nevertheless, in order to achieve sustainable development of the territory, urban planning must be metered by taking into account the environmental balance. Controlling urban sprawl inevitably involves assessing its spatio-temporal evolution. The objective of this study is to explore geospatial data to trace, characterize and monitor the extension of the urban fabric of greater El Jadida and also identify the different stages of urbanization and the changes induced over thirty-four years (1985 to 2019). To this end, three algorithms such as Minimum Distance of Mean (MDM), Maximum Likelihood (MLC) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) were applied to Landsat multispectral satellite images (TM , ETM+ and OLI). The spatial similarity and study area statistics were evaluated to determine the accuracy of the three processes and to choose the most suitable classification algorithm in our case. This methodology allowed the temporal comparison of the different tele-analytical maps of land occupation and land use highlighting the artificialization of the territory and the areas of urban and peri-urban sprawl extension between 1985 and 2019.