| Outward urban growth, driven by increasing population, economic development, and technological advancement, has become a worldwide phenomenon. Such growth is often viewed as the vitality of a regional economy. But it has brought negative impacts on the environment such as biodiversity loss, soil erosion, hydrological perturbation, water and solid pollution, and global warming. Monitoring and modeling urban spatial growth are important for environmental sustainability and urban planning.;This dissertation research has aimed at the investigation of urban growth patterns, urban growth processes, and their relevance through the lens of complexity theory to improve our understanding of the spatial and temporal dynamics of urban growth in a rapidly growing metropolitan area. Central to this research effort is the development of a technological framework that tightly integrates satellite imagery processing, artificial intelligence, and geographic information systems (GIS). Specifically, this project includes two principle components. One is to examine the use of artificial neural networks for improving urban land cover change detection from remote sensor data. Due to their capability of dealing with nonlinear and complex phenomena, integrating artificial neural networks with remote sensing has improved the performance of image classification for the fragmented and heterogeneous landscape in an urban environment. The other component is to characterize urban spatial growth at the metropolitan, functional zone, and cell levels by using three approaches: urban land change mapping, landscape metrics analysis, and moving windows analysis. This part of the research has provided insights into urban growth dynamics in urban societies that are not comparable to either industrial or post-industrial cities in the United States through measuring the spatial and temporal variations of urban patterns and processes at different scales. These societies have unique urban forms and development trajectories due to technological robustness and contemporary international and domestic socio-economic conditions. |
