A Comparative Assessment of Urban Extension With Emphasis on Land Use Changes Over The Period 1967- 2016 (Case Study: Amol And Babol Cities)

The urban scattering that developed as urban scattering after World War II had many unfortunate consequences for cities. The major problems facing cities in the country are the physical, economic, social and environmental interconnectedness of unplanned horizontal expansion. In spite of all the problems, one must also accept the fact that horizontal expansion of cities is inevitable; hence, in recent decades in Iran, the expansion of cities has become a problem and the need to pay attention to urban issues in the context of science, is importance and Necessary. Recent research has analyzed urban sprawl or horizontal sprawl using current and historical remote sensing data using simple statistical models that tend to be applied to different spatial and temporal dimensions and specified that which one of the cities of Amol and Babol of Mazandaran province is of Spiral one and how is its trend over time as well as its rate in different urban segments and which of these two cities has had the most land use changes around them and in which direction is the future of these changes.The data collection tool is based on documentary information. Using IDIRSI and ARC MAP software, Land Use and Supervised Fuzzy Artmap Classification Method was extracted and the Cross Tab Model was used for the extent of land uses changes, Helderen model was used to identify the extent of horizontal expansion and Markov chain method was used to predict land use change trends for the time horizon of 2026. Evaluation of satellite images shows that land use changes in Amol city are more than Babol city. The model results also show that in the city of Babol in 2016, the highest land use changes occurred with 55.54% and the lowest land use change with 2.32%. while in Amol, the largest change in irrigated agricultural land is 66.97%. The physical growth of the cities of Amol and Babol is also mainly due to the population factor, which has resulted in a decrease in gross population density and an increase in the net per capita urban area and ultimately in horizontal and sprawling expansion. The results also show that in Amol orchards, but in Babol, irrigated agricultural lands will have the most changes.