Geo-Spatial Model Of Household Inhabitants' Behaviour On Conversion Of Low-Lying Areas In Sub-Urban Colombo Metropolitan Region, Sri Lanka
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Date
2015-12
Authors
Godella Pathirannahalage Terrence, Sampath Hemakumara
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Publisher
Universiti Sains Malaysia
Abstract
Many metropolises in the tropical Asian region are situated in environmentally sensitive low lying areas that were originally uninhabited, but many driving forces had led to the conversion of the land. Of those, the role played by individual households in suburban areas as converter of lands is crucial. A notable gap in earlier studies is that little attention was paid to modelling the household behaviour and geo-spatial aspects with socio-economic variables to assess their combined effect on the conversion of lands. Three objectives of this study were to assess the present physical status of the housing plots during their transition from low land to home garden condition, to identify the key conversion factors driving this transition from the sectorial views, and to model the variations in the process of conversion of individual plots. To this end, a GIS database was developed that enabled ready identification of all the housing plots. Hence, the housing plot is used as the unit of analysis. According to the images and field surveys, there were 454 households in the core study area. The households were classified into three groups, houses that were already stable in 2005, houses that were non-stable in 2005 and houses that were built after 2005. Having set „stable‟ and „non-stable‟ as the dependent variables on the basis of physical status of houses in 2012, data relating to 294 households were applied to the main model running spatial logistic regression on three sets of variables with the overall model comprising 19 variables. The model was validated using data obtained from 114 households established from mid-2005 to mid-2012. All models are statistically fit and accuracy of overall model is about 92.2%. The main research argument is that stable houses have greater potentials to be converted into the home garden status than non-stable houses. This has been proven conclusively, based on the probability of conversion for each model. Predicted probability value of each land plot has been mapped as conversion potentiality of each housing block to indicate variations among the housing plots and their spatial distribution. Therefore, this model will make a significant contribution to the problem of assessing conversion potential of low lying plots reliably when compared to existing processes. This will help urban planners to formulate sustainable solutions and make decisions more easily to avoid problems caused by unplanned land conversion.
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Keywords
Conversion Of Low-Lying Areas