摘要：Urban growth is most rapid in the developing world, where cities gain an average of five million residentsevery month in a year. The rapid urbanization and other infrastructure development in cities made workers tosubstitute a greater distance between their residencies and the cities so it encroached industries andbusinesses to locate or relocate in suburban fringe areas which contain all facilities such as in metropolitanareas. The urban service area-Madurai, a metropolitan area, is currently experiencing linear to horizontalexpansion and a variety of development pressures due to the unabated scattered population growth andsocio-economic status, which portrays the conversion of agriculture lands, wet lands and number of waterbodies into housing and industrial sites in a haphazard manner at the outskirts of the city known as Maduraisuburban fringe area. This study evaluates the effectiveness of high-resolution satellite data and computeraided GIS techniques in assessing the land use change dynamics within the study area, Madurai city and itssuburban fringe areas, from 2001 to 2008. Satellite images were used for the year 2001 and 2008 at scale1:50000.
