Geocarto International

ISSN: 1010-6049 (Print) 1752-0762 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tgei20

Tracking the relationship between changing

skyline and population growth of an Indian
megacity using earth observation technology

Joy Sanyal & Koel Roychowdhury

To cite this article: Joy Sanyal & Koel Roychowdhury (2016): Tracking the relationship between
changing skyline and population growth of an Indian megacity using earth observation
technology, Geocarto International, DOI: 10.1080/10106049.2016.1213890

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10106049.2016.1213890

Accepted author version posted online: 14

Jul 2016.
Published online: 14 Jul 2016.

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Download by: [University of Technology Sydney] Date: 19 July 2016, At: 13:49
 Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Journal: Geocarto International

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10106049.2016.1213890

Tracking the relationship between changing skyline and population growth of an Indian
megacity using earth observation technology
Downloaded by [University of Technology Sydney] at 13:49 19 July 2016

Joy SANYAL^ and Koel ROYCHOWDHURY

Department of Geography
Presidency University
86/1 College Street
Kolkata-700073, India

Email: Joy Sanyal (joy.geog@presiuniv.ac.in)

Koel Roychowdhury (koel.geog@presiuniv.ac.in)

Tel: +91-9830768076

^ Corresponding author

Tracking the relationship between changing skyline and population growth of an Indian
megacity using earth observation technology

1
 Abstract:
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Temporal analysis of Landsat-TM imageries reveal a saturated state of Kolkata (Calcutta)

Metropolitan Area. However, the city has witnessed accelerated growth in real estate
construction in recent past. This study applies digital photogrammetry to quantify the changes
in Kolkata's skyline. Recently released SRTM DEM of 1 Arc Second and a digital surface
model derived from WorldView-1 stereo images were used to account for the past and recent
surface heights respectively. Consequently, this paper examines whether the sustained
addition in housing capacity has been necessarily driven by a growth in the urban population
/ number of households. Results show that 40.31% of the area experienced vertical growth,
majorly by replacing older dwellings with taller apartment blocks. Further analysis reveals
that part of this newly added residences has remained unoccupied as they were purchased by
non-resident Indians for using as a second home or was never sold due to recent economic
slowdown.

Keywords: vertical growth of city; digital photogrammetry; shrinking city; digital surface
model(DSM)

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1. Introduction:

While the first half of the 20th Century witnessed widespread urbanization in the developed

world, acceleration in the rate of urbanization in the developing world is a relatively recent

phenomenon. It picked up pace in the last quarter of the 20th Century and has become a

significant agent of land cover changes at a global scale in the 21st Century. Today almost

two thirds of the global urban population live in developing countries. Countries such as

India and China have high potential for urbanization with around two-fifth of global urban

population living in these two countries. It has been predicted that India will be the home to

14% of the world's city dwellers by 2050 (Swerts et al., 2014). However, the process of

urbanization has undergone changes over time and so is the process of urban planning.

Recent times have seen the process of shrinking cities, a phenomenon where large cities

experience a decrease in population. According to the Shrinking Cities International Research

Network (SCIRN), a shrinking city is a densely populated urban area (with population more

than 10,000) experiencing sustained loss of its population for more than two years leading to

economic transformations and signs of structural crisis. Apart from cities of the United States

and Europe, countries such as India and China account for 60% of the declining cities in the

developing world. According to the census of India 2011, the Indian megacities, which have

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 been magnets for economic activities and sustained rural to urban migration in the past, are

showing signs of saturation. The rate of population growth between 2000 and 2011 in Indian

megacities (10 million plus population) like Mumbai, Delhi and Kolkata has become almost

half of what it was from 1991 to 2001 (Gururaja and Sudhira , 2012). Instead there is a

significant growth in the number of smaller towns located mostly in the neighbourhood of the

large cities. Spill over of urban activities in the neighbouring rural areas of the megacities is

suggested to be the main reason behind this phenomenon (Mitra & Kumar, 2015). This trend

is likely to set the direction of future urban development and planning in the long run.
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Planners and developers traditionally used to deal with housing shortages, deficit

infrastructure, congestion and other growth related problems. Due to shrinking cities

phenomenon, they are now forced to deal with problems of high residential and commercial

vacancy rates (Ganapati, 2014).

The liberal economic policies undertaken by the government of India has led to private

investments, rising urbanization and growing middle-class population across the country. As

a consequence, since 2000, the demand for business and commercial spaces increased in

India (KPMG, 2014) making the real estate sector one of the major beneficiaries (CRISIL

Research, 2010). However, according to National Real Estate Development Council, the

residential real estate market momentum has reversed in many parts of the last few years.

Escalating residential property prices, low appreciation levels and increasing risk attached to

investing in residential properties have contributed towards a weakened confidence in this

asset, which was otherwise, the most preferred one for investors and end-users in the previous

years (NAREDCO, 2015). The rise and fall of residential real estate market in India can be

divided into five phases (CRISIL Research, 2010; NAREDCO, 2015). The initial phase

(phase I) extending from 2001 – 2005 witnessed steady growth in the residential real estate

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 sector. This rise in demand was further reflected in phase II (2006 2008) when house prices

doubled. This phase was characterized by low interest rates and fiscal incentives on housing

loans. However, this phase was followed by a phase of substantial slowdown of the demand

of residential sector starting from 2009 – 2010 (Phase III). The decline was attributed to

global economic downturn, which led to a slowdown in the capital market and decline in

affordability of the potential buyers. The next phase staring from 2011 – 2014 experienced a

consolidation when demand for real estate was recovering along with modest rise in the

capital values. During this phase urban areas witnessed a substantial supply of housing
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(CRISIL Research, 2010).

Very often, changes in the intensity of the already existing urban fabric are driven by urban

redevelopment. However, it is difficult to trace this process with focus only on the lateral

expansion of built-up spaces. This method of geographical expansion commonly compares

two subsequent land-use maps to evaluate the growth in built-up areas. Traditionally, urban

volume was associated with urban density, which took into consideration tall and spacious

buildings housing large number of urban residents and employees (Koomen et al., 2009). The

current research argues that urban compactness measured only as a function of lateral

expansion of paved surface without any consideration of the change in the vertical dimension

is likely to paint a spurious state of urbanization.

Although scientific literature is replete with case studies concerning detection of lateral urban

expansion or urban sprawl (Bhatta et al., 2010; Bhatta, 2009a), studies incorporating the

changes in the height of the buildings are conspicuously scarce. Where such studies are

reported, the painstaking nature of data collection in them (Kaňuk et al., 2015; Frenkel, 2007;

Holtier et al., 2000; Acevedo & Masuoka, 1997) makes the difficulties of undertaking this

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 task evident. These studies used information about historical building records from the

archives of the local municipal bodies to visualise the transformation of urban morphology in

three-dimension in GIS. Such detailed and well maintained archives about individual

buildings are seldom found for the large metropolis in the developing world in general and

India in particular.

Recent advances in remote sensing, particularly in the field of very high resolution satellite

imageries, have paved the way for using Earth Observation (EO) data in deriving accurate
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and high resolution DSM of cities. For example, Koomen et al. (2009) took advantage of

Dutch National elevation dataset (Actueel Hoogtebestand Nederland http://www.ahn.nl),

created with LiDAR data and available at 4 m resolution, to derive urban volume of

Amsterdam. Wurm et al. (2013) analysed the two and three-dimensional growth in Cologne

from 1975 to 2009 employing Landast MSS and TM imageries for detecting land-cover

change while using a Airborne LiDAR-based DEM to account for the recent building heights.

No historical DEM was used to directly compare the building heights between 1975 and

2009. Sirmacek et al. (2012) compared the effectiveness of creating three-dimensional

building models for part of Munich city from IRS Cartosat-1, WorldView-2, Ikonos and

LiDAR data. They concluded that the DSMs created from the aforesaid sources are not

directly suitable for 3D rendering of individual buildings and require further processing

taking building shape and structure into consideration. Very high resolution Airborne LiDAR

data was also successfully employed to derive individual building heights, areas, volumes and

even urban density attributes like floor area ratio (Gonzalez-Aguilera et al., 2013; Chen et al.,

2014; Chen et al., 2012). Unmanned aerial vehicles (Rodriguez-Gonzalvez et al., 2014) and

even laser scanners mounted on helicopters (Hebel et al., 2013) have been put to use to

acquire very high density 3-D point cloud for extracting various attributes of buildings in an

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 automated manner. It is worth mentioning, that acquisition of these types of data are

prohibitively expensive for developing nations. Even without the consideration of cost, the

space-borne sensors are preferable over the airborne ones, especially for the developing

countries, due to the systematic data acquisition capability of the former at specific time

intervals. It is safe to assume that no high resolution historic DSM dating back to 2000 exists

for large cities of the world, let alone the ones in the developing countries. In the absence of

such historic data, detecting changes in individual building attributes at such fine scale over a

decade would be impossible. Not surprisingly, almost none of the aforesaid studies dealing
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with extraction of building geometry from photogrammetry or LiDAR processing attempted a

change detection involving historic DSMs. Release of SRTM DEM at 1 arc second (~30 m)

resolution by USGS in 2015 for major part of the world has presented a unique opportunity to

look into the surface elevation of the large cities for a significant period back in time. Such

data was not available until now as the SRTM DEM was distributed at 90 m resolution

outside USA, which is too coarse for even a large-scale analysis of man-made structures on

the terrain.

Apparently there is insignificant change in an already saturated urban landscape in the

megacities of India in terms of growth in built up area as captured by periodic satellite

images. The insignificant and/or negative changes in the growth of urban population seem to

agree with this observation. However, local knowledge of the authors and newspaper articles

suggest a booming construction activity of multi-storeyed buildings in the recent past. The

use of photogrammetry provides us the unique opportunity to unambiguously confirm the

boom in building high rises over past one decade or so. Hence, this paper seeks to explore

means of detecting significant urban expansion using earth observation technology, when

analysis of conventional satellite imageries reveals a saturated state with negligible spreading

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 out of built-up surfaces. We are also interested to know whether sustained addition in housing

capacity in a large city over a decade is necessarily driven by a growth in the urban

population / number of households.

2. Study area:
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Northern and central parts of the city of Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), the capital of the state

of West Bengal, India is chosen as the case study area (Fig 1). It is located in eastern part of

the country on the eastern bank of the Hooghly river. With an urban population of 14.1

million, it is the third largest metropolitan area of India and the 8th largest urban conurbation

of the world. For past few years India's prominent newspaper reports have been highlighting

the phenomenon of the spurt of high-rise real estate construction in Kolkata often at the cost

of old heritage buildings (Niyogi, 2015; Times News Network, 2014; Mukherjee Pandey,

2012). Demolishing older and single-family dwellings and construction of multi-storeyed

apartments in their place have become a very common sighting in Kolkata in last one decade.

Bose (2014) reported a rise in the construction of luxurious condominiums enclaves, majorly

marked toward successful non-resident Indian communities, from 40 in 2004 to 120 by 2012

and increasingly at the heart of the already saturated city itself.

Bhatta (2009b) derived the expansion of built-up areas using satellite images of ~ 30 m

spatial resolution for different parts of the area under Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC).

He reported an increase in the built-up surface from ~84% to 88 % in the northern portion

between 1990 and 2005 while the figure remained stagnant at ~ 86% during that period for

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 the central area. Northern and central Kolkata are the oldest and most mature parts of

Kolkata.

3. Data and Methods:

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We used various types of remotely sensed data, ground control points and secondary data

related to population growth for the study area. The information about the data used and their

specific purpose in the current research have been summarised in Table 1. The following

sections deal with the detailed treatment of the data presented in Table 1

3.1 Measuring vertical growth in the urban area:

In order to quantify the changes in elevation over a period of time we need to have two maps

with spatially distributed elevation information corresponding to the beginning and end of the

period under consideration. A digital elevation model (DEM), where elevation information is

represented in gridded format, is the most appropriate data format for generating these maps.

On the other hand, a digital surface model (DSM) represents the surface of the earth

including the height of the tree tops, buildings and any human-made feature in DEM format.

In addition, a digital terrain model (DTM) refers to a bare earth elevation surface in gridded

format that doesn't include heights of vegetation and buildings. Hence, DSM and DTM can

be considered as two forms of a DEM. The DEM, which is of a reasonably small grid size

and available for the earliest date covering Kolkata is Shuttle Radar Topographic Mission

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 (SRTM) 1 Arc-Second Global DEM with an approximate grid dimension of 30m. This

product represents the height of the surface including the building roofs, hence can be

categorised as a digital surface model (DSM). A ground resolution of 30 m is not ideal for

representing the building heights of an Indian city as the average dimension of the dwellings

is not more than 15-m. Due to the unavailability of high resolution stereo satellite images or

aerial photographs for the early part of the last decade SRTM DEM was the only option. The

radar data for creating this DEM was acquired in 2000. Thus, it represents the surface

elevation of Kolkata in 2000. This fact was particularly advantageous for this study as the
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city's skyline derived from SRTM DEM closely corresponds with the Indian census of 2001.

We used a pair of high resolution WorldView-1 satellite stereo imageries, acquired on 13

September 2013, for creating a digital surface model (DSM) of Kolkata (See Fig 1 for the

footprint of the imageries) using digital photogrammetric techniques. WorldView-1 satellite

images have a spatial resolution of 50-cm and are considered ideal for creating DSMs of

compact built-up areas. Each WorldView-1 satellite image is supplied with the associated

rational polynomial coefficient (RPC) that is used to determine the ground coordinate of the

pixels. Toutin et al. (2012) created a DEM from WorldView-1 stereo images without in situ

ground control points (GCPs) and reported an error of 2.6-m (LE68) for bare surface.

Evidently, the error would accentuate for compact urban areas and is over the acceptable

limit of the current investigation. In order to create a more accurate DSM the RPC model

supplied by the vendor are required to be further refined. This task is accomplished by

identifying highly accurate GCPs with precise X (Longitude) Y (Latitude) Z (Elevation) on

the stereo pairs. Such accurate GCPs can be measured with a pair of differential GPS (dGPS).

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 A dGPS survey works with a fixed base station and a rover that is taken to the point of

interest for measuring the XYZ coordinates. Both instruments must work simultaneously

during the survey. It is required to know the precise XYZ coordinates of the base station

location. The XY coordinates of the SRTM DEM conform to longitudes and latitudes

according to the WGS84 ellipsoid and the Z coordinate at each grid represent the orthometric

height or height above mean sea level. Orthometric height is derived by subtracting the

EGM96 geoid height from WGS84 ellipsoid height. The coordinates supplied in the

WorldView-1 RPS files provide XYZ coordinates as longitudes, latitudes and ellipsoid
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heights according to WGS84 ellipsoid. Supplying highly accurate and precise known

coordinates for the base station location is crucial for creating the DSM from the WorldView-

1 stereo images in the same horizontal and vertical reference frame as the SRTM DEM.

Unless this is ensured, the heights of individual grid cells cannot be compared between the

two elevation maps (Sanyal et al., 2013). A static observation was taken for eight hours at a

secure location within our study area using a dual frequency (L1/L2) dGPS equipment for

deriving the known coordinates of the base station. The observation file was converted into

RINEX format and uploaded to CSRS PPP web service of Natural Resources Canada

(http://webapp.geod.nrcan.gc.ca/geod/tools-outils/ppp.php) to obtain the longitude, latitude

and ellipsoid height according to WGS84 Ellipsoid of the location in mm accuracy.

In the next step, we followed a conventional digital photogrammetric workflow. Fourteen

three-dimensional GCPs were surveyed (Fig 1) which are mostly the rooftops corners of

buildings that can be distinctly identified on both images of the WorldView-1 stereo pairs.

102 tie points were generated using an automated pattern recognition function of the digital

photogrammetric software. A root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.59 pixels was achieved

with the block triangulation process. The difference of intersected and measured control

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 points in terms of RMSE at X, Y and Z direction were reported as 0.55-m, 0.89-m and 1.25-

m respectively. The window size of the kernel used for computing the correlation coefficient

between the left and right images was kept at 9 during the DEM extraction step. This window

size helped to strike a balance between confining the geometry of the model and providing

the program reasonable number of pixels on both images to find a statistical match for

identifying the same point on the left and right image. The XYZ coordinates of these points

were checked for blunders and filtered to form the final point cloud in the subsequent stages

of the photogrammetric workflow. The point cloud was gridded at a resolution of 3-m to
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generate the WV DEM (Fig 2). An accuracy assessment exercise with 17 additional surveyed

points revealed a RMSE of 0.8-m in the elevation of the WV DEM (Fig 2).

The original point cloud generated by the digital photogrammetric processing of the

WorldView-1 stereo imageries was gridded in 30-m resolution to match the grid dimension

of the WV DEM with the SRTM DEM. In the next step, the SRTM DEM was subtracted

from the WV DEM (30-m resolution) on a cell-by-cell basis using GIS software for deriving

the vertical changes in the surface height between 2000 and 2013. The increase of elevation

from 2000 to 2013 was classified into 4-m intervals, which is commonly the height of a

single storey in Kolkata. The pixels recording - 2-m to +2-m change were not considered

significant in terms of vertical change. It was very likely that these elevation differences were

a result of the inherent error of the two DEMs rather than actual changes due to real estate

development. Another reason for ignoring these pixels is the fact that 2-m is well short of the

height of a single storey. In addition, the pixels where the elevations for 2000 were found to

be more than 2-m greater than the elevation in 2013, were considered as error and identified

as 'anomaly' in the analysis.

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 3.2 Measuring expansion of built-up areas:

A check on the changes in the built-up areas within the aforesaid time frame was carried out

using satellite images with a purpose of comparing the vertical change with the horizontal

one. One Landsat-7 ETM+ image acquired on 15 November, 1999 and another Landsat-5 TM

image of 08 November, 2011 were used for this purpose. We acknowledge that the 30m

spatial resolution of the optical bands of these images are not ideal for land-use classification

in compact urban areas where very often more than one land-use is found within a 30-m ×
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30-m area. However, given the 30-m grid size of the vertical change examination (forced by

the 30-m dimension of SRTM DEM), a similar spatial resolution for the land-use change was

necessary to make findings of these two analyses compatible.

The concept of Normalised Difference Built-up Index (NDBI), specifically devised for

processing Landsat TM multispectral bands (Zha et al., 2003) was adopted for extracting the

built-up areas. The concept of NDBI is based on the observation that built-up areas and

barren land record a steep increment in their reflectance from band 4 to band 5 while the

corresponding changes for the vegetation cover is minimum. This drastic rate of increase in

the reflectance from band 4 to band 5 far exceeds any other land cover. Hence, Zha et al.

(2003) suggested that the standardised differentiation of band 5 and 4 would result in positive

values for the built-up areas while all other major land cover categories would report negative

values, enabling the former to be differentiated from the rest.

For each of the two images the following digital image processing steps were carried out:

A. A Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) was created using the following

formula:

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 Band 4(NIR) − Band 3(Red)
Band 4(NIR) + Band 3(Red)

B. A NDBI image was also created using the following formula:

Band 5(Mid IR) − Band 4(Red)

Band 5(Mid IR) + Band 4(Red)

Generally, positive values of NDVI images indicate vegetation covered surface and negative

values an absence of it. On the other hand, similar ranges of values of NDBI images depict

presence and absence of built-up surfaces. However, Zha et al. (2003) reported that in certain

cases, depending on the pixel values of the surrounding environment, positive NDBI values
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may include vegetation. In order to ensure the exclusion of vegetation covered pixels from

the pixels that were classified as built-up area from NDBI images, we subtracted the NDVI

image from the NDBI image. The NDVI image was subtracted from the NDBI image and

Consequently, a threshold was applied to extract the pixels having the extracted positive

values in the resultant images provided These extracted pixels represent the built-up areas in

November, 1999 and November, 2011 which is chronologically quite close to our time frame

of comparison (i.e. 2000 - 2013). The grid cells classified as non-built-up in both 1999 and

2013 images were extracted using a raster overlay operation using ArcGIS Spatial Analyst.

The accuracy of classification of the 2011 image was 86.25%. It was examined from the

historical high resolution images available from Google Earth acquired on 18 November,

2011. Hundred randomly distributed ground reference points were used for examining the

level of accuracy. The random points were generated using Create Random Points tool in

ArcGIS. As we have no access to any other historical high resolution images corresponding

to 1999, it was not possible to carry out similar accuracy assessment for that year. However,

as same digital image processing techniques were employed on data from similar sensors, it

can be assumed that same level of accuracy will be achieved for the 1999 image.We formed a

mask using the built-up and non-built-up cells and applied it on the map depicting change in

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 elevation in the study area between 2000 and 2013. Thus, the non-built up areas were

excluded from the further analysis of vertical change detection.

3.3 Mapping clusters of vertical development:

Hotspot analysis is a geostatistical technique for identifying statistically significant clusters in

a spatial data based on the density of incidents inside spatial areas (polygons). This

methodology is widely used in the analysis of spatial pattern of crimes and diseases (Wang et
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al., 2013). The Optimized Hot Spot Analysis tool in ArcGIS 10.2 was used to make out the

grid cells demonstrating statistically significant clustering of elevation increase. This tool

creates Z-score and P-value for each feature. A high Z-score and small P value indicate high

degree of spatial clustering but in order to be a statistically significant hot spot, a feature also

has to be surrounded by features having high Z-scores. A Z-score near zero illustrate no

spatial clustering. Only grid cells representing significant vertical increase in elevation (i.e. >

2-m) were exported into a polygon vector layer and used as input for the hotspot analysis.

The vertical change in terms of equivalent number of storeys was stored in those grids. These

values become available as an attribute of the input vector layer and were used as the

'Analysis Field' in the Optimized Hot Spot Analysis Tool to generate a hot spot map of

vertical change from 2000 to 2013.

4. Results:

Changes in the elevation and groundcover of built-up areas within the time frame of this

investigation are depicted in Fig 3. While an accuracy assessment was carried out for the WV

DEM at 3-m resolution it is not meaningful to perform a similar exercise for the SRTM DEM

15
 and the resampled WV DEM which were used for deriving the vertical change detection map

(Fig 3A). These two DEMs have a resolution of 30-m. Elevation of the surface that includes

ground as well as buildings with varying heights is seldom homogeneous for a 30-m × 30-m

area in a compact built-up area. Each SRTM pixel represents the mean elevation within that

area. Hence, it is impractical to compare these elevation values with surveyed points. Table 2

was compiled from Fig 3A and illustrates that 40.31 % of our study area recorded a

significant vertical increase in the elevation between 2000 and 2013 while 22.32 % area

remained unchanged. The error reported in 6.55 % percent area is considered acceptable,
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given the 30-m dimension of the reference DEM (the SRTM DEM which was used as the

base elevation for the comparison).

Table 3 was derived from Fig 3B. It shows small expansion of built-up areas (11.38% of the

total area) compared to the extent of built-up (53.44 % of the total area) and non-built-up

areas (30.09 % of the total area) that remained unchanged between 1999 and 2011. A

comparison of the expansion of built-up areas (11.38%) and the area exhibiting significant

vertical growth (40.31%) reveals that a substantial portion of the new development between

2000 and 2013 took place by replacing older buildings with new taller buildings or adding

new floors to existing buildings. Development on empty plots (and thus leading to vertical

growth) could not have been a widespread phenomenon.

5. Discussion:

5.1. Findings from earth observation

Newly constructed buildings primarily drive increase in the corresponding elevation of a

pixel of two DSMs in a compact urban area. However, growth/decline of the height and area

16
 of tree canopies in urban areas may, albeit to a limited extent, contribute to this change.

Existence of surface water, a common feature of Kolkata in the form of ponds, can also lead

to error in the DEM. SRTM DEM was derived by C-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR)

data. Recording radar backscatter from clam water in C-Band SAR is problematic due to

specular reflection of radar waves from water surface (Kim et al., 2014). The WV DEM was

generated using digital photogrammetric techniques which majorly depends on image

contrast to find matching points on the left and right image. Water surface have minimum

contrast and also poses a problem for this technology to work efficiently (Sanyal et al., 2014).
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Due to the aforesaid limitations the difference in the elevation values of individual grid cells

of 30-m × 30-m dimension do not very accurately represent the increase of height exclusively

caused by the recent development of higher buildings. Nevertheless, due to the very closely

packed building patterns in North Kolkata, Fig 3A depicts a genuine overall growth in

average building heights.

Mixed land-use patterns and heterogeneous building heights within a grid dimension make it

difficult to ascertain whether the difference in a grid elevation value between the SRTM

DEM and WV DEM is actually a result of replacing a low building with a higher one. This

factor has a more pronounced effect where multiple old buildings were replaced with a larger

and higher one. Fig 4 A & B present a typical example from the study area where the height

difference between the two DEMs accurately represent construction of a recent higher

building replacing several older low ones. In this occasion the two pixels (the division was

omitted) recorded a growth of 5 storeys (~20-m). On the other hand, Fig 4 C & D depict a

case where a large building of uniform height has been constructed over an area replacing a

pond, two low buildings, some empty space and couple of trees. As a consequence, the cells

covering the new building recorded increase of height in various degrees ranging from 4 to 6-

17
 m. The grid cells in Fig 3A representing this type of scenario are not suitable for deriving an

unambiguous conclusion about increasing building heights in a location between 2000 and

2013. The extracted built-up areas from the Landsat imageries were found to be largely

accurate when compared with high-resolution images available in Google Earth. However,

the area showing conversion of built-up areas into non-built-up category from 1999 to 2011 is

unrealistic in the context of ground realities in Kolkata. A thorough inspection with the aid of

high-resolution images reveals that the error was primarily a result of the inability of the

NDBI methodology to differentiate between barren surfaces with built-up areas. Some of the
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playgrounds and empty spaces were found to be classified as non-built up areas in the 2011

image probably because they were covered with grass. But these places were classified as

built-up in the 1999 image as it is likely that these locations have no grass cover during the

acquisition of the 1999 image.

The pattern of real estate hotspots (Fig 5) largely reveals a degree of spatial concurrence with

areas that have been identified as expansion of built-up surface from 1999 to 2011 (red colour

in Fig 3B). It indicates that developers have certain preference in constructing very high-rise

buildings on empty plots. The necessity of a large plots size for building a large apartment

complex with several high rise blocks might have been the reason behind it. It is unusual for

developers to buy number of contiguous existing old houses and demolish them to get the

required area for building a large apartment complex.

5.2. Demographic and real estate perspectives

The results derived from earth observation data clearly reveal an increase in the urban volume

in north Kolkata between 2000 and 2013. Interestingly, Indian census data established a

18
 negative growth in the total population and marginal increase in the number of households

over this period. According to the Indian census of 2001 and 2011, the total population of the

municipal wards under the study area (46 wards) recorded a decrease of 3.80 %, whereas the

number of households increased by 6.33 %.This type of scenario could arise due to three

possible reasons: a) a substantial portion of the additional capacity in the vertical dimension

has been occupied by commercial establishments, thus having no impact on the number of

resident population/households reported by the census, b) a significant share of the new taller

buildings have been sold as residential properties but not used by their owners as their
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primary home, c) a significant number of these recently developed residential housings

remained unsold. During the acquisition of the satellite imageries some of the buildings might

had their outer framework completed, thus detected by the DSMs as taller buildings, but yet

to be ready for occupation. This factor could also contribute to the disagreement between the

results derived from photogrammetric outputs and census data. However, this factor was

likely to be true for both 2000 and 2013 DSMs and considered insignificant.

Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) maintains a comprehensive database about the plan

sanctioned for every new building from 2000 to present. It includes the area of the plot and

the type of use of the property. The information is arranged for each of the 144 municipal

wards. The type of use of each building is categorised into nine classes as Residential,

Business, Assembly, Institutional, Mercantile (Residential), Educational, Industrial, Storage

and Hazardous. There were more than twelve thousand entries in that database between 2000

and 2013. It reveals that in our study area, comprising 46 municipal wards, 80. 70 % of the

total land for which new building plans were sanctioned belonged to the residential category.

It is followed by the Assembly category (12.57%) where the proportion of the actual built-up

space to the total plot area is likely to be low. We would like to point out that sanction of

19
 plans do not necessarily mean immediate resumption of construction and often there is

considerable time lag between the plan sanction date and actual occupation of the built-up

space. Nevertheless, the aforementioned figure is quite indicative of the clear dominance of

the residential sector in the recent construction activity in Kolkata even in the core of the city

where our study area is located. At best, the first possibility is likely to have very marginal

impact on the apparent discrepancy between the availability of additional built-up space and

population growth.
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There is no database to verify the second possibility, at least at the municipal ward level.

However, we consider it to be a significant cause behind the issue under consideration. In

India, subsidy exists for home ownership in the form of deduction in personal income tax of

interest payment on mortgages up to a limit. This factor motivates people in the high income

group to own a second property. This group with high disposable income also considered it as

an avenue of safe investment with highest return due to the persistence of speedy appreciation

in the property prices in the 2000s in Kolkata. An increasing number of non-resident Indians

are seeking a familiar and comfortable second home in their native city (i.e. Kolkata) and in

the process owning high-end properties (Bose, 2014; Roy, 2011). The existence of large

number of sold but largely unoccupied dwellings are attributable to the aforesaid reasons.

Many newspaper articles and reports have documented the third possibility. Our

study area is located at a comparatively congested part of the city with the airport and the

northern-most underground rail terminal present in this zone. The major developments in this

area are taking place around the broad road networks. Upcoming and existing underground

railway, widening of the existing road networks, traffic dispersal facilities at major road

junctions and proximity to newly developed satellite township (Rajarhat New Town area) are

the main growth simulators in this zone (ICICI, 2015). These areas are also coinciding with

20
 the hotspots (Fig 5). However, it has been reported that there is a fall in demand for premium

housing in this area in the last few quarters (ENS Economic Bureau, 2015). Real estate

market scenario is measured by “quarters to sell unsold inventory” (QTS). It is the number of

quarters required to exhaust the existing unsold inventory in the market. A lower QTS

represents a healthier market. The QTS for Kolkata has been increasing gradually since 2012,

and currently stands at 12.5 quarters. North Kolkata, where our study area is located, holds a

QTS of 12.7 and an age of inventory pegged at 7.5 quarters. In particular, the demand for

high quality office space in Kolkata during the fourth quarter of 2014 fell by 56 % from the
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previous quarter and an overall vacancy rate in this type of property was reported to be at

35.1% during this period Cushman and Wakefield (2015). All these reports indicate a general

trend of excess in the supply of built-up space in the study area for last five years or so.

In summary, it is a combination of house ownership by non-residents and excess supply of

real estates, a legacy of economic boom in the early 2000s, that have contributed to the

emergence of current real estate scenario in Kolkata. The use of earth observation technology

helped to establish the trend of rapid expansion of Kolkata in the vertical dimension between

2000 and 2013 in unequivocal terms.

6. Conclusion:

The study has focussed on the need for considering urban volume in order to depict the real

nature of urban redevelopment in the 20th century. In contrast to the traditional 2D depiction

of urban sprawl, which can sometimes illustrate a stagnant scenario, the method proposed in

the research focuses on the change in the vertical dimension in order to get a realistic idea of

urban compactness. Photogrammetric techniques were used to quantify the changes in

21
 elevation of built-up areas between 2000 and 2013 using Shuttle Radar Topographic Mission

(SRTM) 1 Arc-Second Global DEM and a pair of high-resolution WorldView-1 satellite

stereo imageries. Since satellite images were used as the main data source, the proposed

methodology can be easily adopted in other developing countries that lack systematic archive

of building data. Many countries have invested in high-rise buildings to meet rising demand

for space. However, urban planners in countries those are experiencing shrinking cities

phenomenon are dealing with problems of high residential and commercial vacancy rates.

Vacant and abandoned properties are often linked to declining property values. The benefit of
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detecting the hot spot areas of new high rise building construction along with the vacancy

rates will help urban planners to match strategies for combating vacancy to neighbourhood

market conditions.

22
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26
 Table1: Summary of the various types of data used for tracking the dynamics of changing
skyline of Kolkata, India.

Sl. No Data Date of Acquisition Purpose

1 SRTM DEM (1 Arc Sec) 11-21 February, 2000 Capturing historic 3D skyline
2 WorldView-1 Stereo Satellite 13 September, 2013 DEM generation and Capturing
Image (0.5 m) recent 3D skyline
3 Landsat 7 ETM+ Image 15 November, 1999 Deriving historic horizontal extent
(30 m) of built-up area
4 Landsat 5 TM Image 08 November, 2011 Deriving current horizontal extent
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(30 m) of built-up area

5 Census of India figures for 2001 & 2011 Enumerate population growth
Kolkata
6 Differential GPS Data November - December, Accuracy assessment of DEMs
2014

27
 Table: 2 Measure of vertical change between 2000 and 2013 derived from SRTM DEM and
the DEM generated from WorldView-1 stereo satellite images for part of Kolkata

Measure of vertical change Percentage of total area

1 storey equivalent (4m) 24.57
2 storey equivalent (8m) 11.57
3 storey equivalent (12m) 3.32
4 storey equivalent (16m) 0.71
5 storey equivalent (20m) 0.03
6 storey equivalent (22m) 0.08
7 storey equivalent (26m) 0.02
More than 6 storey equivalent (> 26m) 0.007
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Total Significant change 40.31

No Significant change 22.32
Anomaly (< 2m) 6.55

28
 Table 3: Dynamics of built-up areas in the study area between 1999 and 2011 for part of

Kolkata.

Category Percentage of total area

Neither built-up in 1999 nor in 2011 30.09

(Unambiguously non built-up)
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Built-up in 1999 AND 2011 (Unambiguously built-up) 53.44

Not built-up in 1999 but built-up in 2011 (Expansion) 11.38

Not built-up in 2011 but built-up in 1999 (Error) 5.09

29
 List of figures

Fig 1. Study area with the footprint of WorldView-1 stereo satellite imageries used for
deriving the digital surface model of Kolkata in 2013.

Fig 2. The digital surface model with 3 m grid dimension for part of Kolkata derived from
WorldView-1 stereo satellite imageries of 2013; inset showing the sites of conducting
accuracy assessment study.

Fig 3. Urban growth in north Kolkata; A - Vertical growth in northern Kolkata from 2000 to
2013 and B - lateral expansion of built-up areas between 1999 and 2011. The spatial
resolution of the maps is 30-m.

Fig 4: Typical examples of the vertical expansion derived by subtracting SRTM DEM from
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WV DEM; the grid boundaries for determining vertical growth from SRTM and WV DEM
were superimposed on the high resolution satellite images acquired close to the date of
acquisition of the data from which the two DEMs were created; the numbers denote height
increase of equivalent storeys.

Fig 5 Hot spot analysis showing hot spots of high-rise construction between 2000 and 2013 in
north Kolkata.

30
 88°15'0"E 88°20'0"E 88°25'0"E 88°30'0"E

22°40'0"N

4 2
±
0 4 km
22°40'0"N

22°35'0"N 22°35'0"N
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22°30'0"N 22°30'0"N

Location of the Study Area

22°25'0"N 22°25'0"N
within India

Ê Legend

±
Ground Control Points Surveyed with dGPS
Boundaries of WorldView-1 Stereo Imageries
Boundary of Kolkata Municipal Corporation
22°20'0"N 22°20'0"N
Study Area
1,000 500 0 1,000 km

88°15'0"E 88°20'0"E 88°25'0"E 88°30'0"E

 Downloaded by [University of Technology Sydney] at 13:49 19 July 2016

200 100

1
0

0.5
0
´
200 M

1 km
 Vertical changes
from 2000 and 2013 Changes in built-up area
from 1999 to 2011
1 Storey Equivalent
Never Built-up
2 Storey Equivalent
3 Storey Equivalent Built-up only in 1999
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4 Storey Equivalent Built-up expansion

from 1999 to 2011
5 Storey Equivalent
6 Storey Equivalent Built-up in both 1999 & 2011

7 Storey Equivalent
8 Storey Equivalent
9 Not Significant Change
10 Anomaly

A
2 1
±
0 2 km
B
Downloaded by [University of Technology Sydney] at 13:49 19 July 2016
A B

5 5

11 March, 2002 30 April, 2013

C D

5 4 5 4
5 4 5 4
6
6

11 March, 2002 01 November, 2013

 ±

Intensity of Hot Spot

Hot Spot - 90% Confidence

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Hot Spot - 95% Confidence

Hot Spot - 99% Confidence

2 1 0 2 km