An Evaluation of the planning implications driven by urban sprawl with special reference to the suburbs of Kandy city

The world urbanisation level is reaching to 60% in the year 2030 which is now at the level of 50% out of world’s total population as forecasted by the population and statistical division of the United Nations. As a result of this transformation process, the urban sprawl takes place in the edges and outside the areas of cities while creating many socio, economic and physical issues specially in the aspect of environment. Urban sprawl is defined as unplanned expansion of urban boundaries in to the rural areas outside the city boundary. Urban sprawl is also characterised by suburban residential areas or as Metropolitan areas that comprises with the number of secondary townships around the main city. These main city and secondary townships highly connected with the interacted transportation networks lead to establishing growth corridors along the connection lines. There are two significant differences in urban sprawl in developing and developed countries like car based communities, income level, Infrastructure availability etc. But some features like traffic congestion, environment degradation, and linkage with transportation networks and are common to both types of countries. The transportation is dominant root cause in urban sprawl that leads to expansion of the city functions towards the rural areas or edges of city boundaries along with the transport networks and where the higher transport linkages are available. In the same time many environment degradations in natural and manmade environments are available due to this urban sprawl like water pollution, air pollution and agriculture land fragmentation etc. This study focus to find the interrelation in between urban sprawl areas of main city and the secondary and other townships and to degrade the environment quality of the area that is adversely affected to sensitivity of the environment. This evaluation is done by the case study for Kandy city and its suburbs that one of the developing and main cities in sensitive area in central hill region of the country. The urban sprawl areas are measured by the Space Syntax analysis and the level is measured by weighted ranks of the townships. environment impact of these areas are evaluated by developing an environment degradation index by searching the Google images. Key words: Urban Sprawl, Environmental degradation, Evaluation