A Comparative Geospatial Analysis of Urban Growth Patterns Across India's Different City Tiers for Citizen-Centered Governance and Sustainability

Abstract. India is going through one of the biggest changes in its cities in human history. This change brings both big chances for economic growth and big risks to social equity and environmental sustainability. This paper looks at how cities in India have grown from 2005 to 2025 on a variety of scales and in a variety of city tiers. This study looks at how urban growth changes over time and space in representative Tier-I, Tier-II, and Tier-III cities by using a mixed-method approach that combines multi-temporal Landsat satellite images, census data, and a critical review of national urban policies. The study uses Land Use and Land Cover (LULC) classification, change detection, and spatial metrics like Shannon's entropy to measure and compare different types of growth, such as infill, edge-expansion, and leapfrog development. Our results show that growth patterns are different in different parts of the urban hierarchy. For example, mature megacities have a complicated pattern of peripheral sprawl and internal densification, while Tier-II cities are growing the fastest and in the most chaotic, dispersive way. Tier-III towns, on the other hand, are either starting to grow or are stuck. One of the main points of this paper is that there is a big gap between the way things are on the ground and the way national urban policies are set up, especially the Smart Cities Mission (SCM). The SCM has done a lot of work on infrastructure projects, but its area-based development model and technology-focused solutions don't always fit well with the main problem of managing uncontrolled peripheral growth. This misalignment shows that India's urban governance framework has deeper problems, such as a lack of statutory master planning and the limited capacity of Urban Local Bodies (ULBs). The paper ends by saying that India could end up with cities that are broken, unsustainable, and unfair if it doesn't fundamentally change how cities are run to put empowered local planning first and create a way to manage rapid urban growth. We suggest a set of policy recommendations for each tier that will help create a more spatially aware, citizen-centered, and sustainable urban future.