Urban Growth Analysis and Modelling Based on Socio-Economic Agents Using Cellular Automata

India is undergoing a phase of unprecedented urbanisation. Sprawling of cities spatially has always been a research concern for planners. Cities have attained saturation in terms of resource consumption and are growing beyond administrative boundaries in an unplanned and dispersed fashion, leading to urban sprawl. Existing studies have focused mainly on the change pattern and have not concentrated on developing models that can establish growth potential of the city. Results of study on Kochi reveals urban growth has increased about five folds during the last three decades and dispersed growth is observed in the NE direction. Integrated agent based Cellular Automata (CA) model provided valuable insights in understanding the growth poles of the region.