Urbanisation and changing temperature patterns in the city of Bengaluru
- PDF / 1,596,341 Bytes
- 20 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 25 Downloads / 185 Views
Urbanisation and changing temperature patterns in the city of Bengaluru N. S. Nalini1 Received: 23 January 2020 / Accepted: 25 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Urbanisation processes influence spatial expansion and growth direction of cities. However, spatial expansion and development of the city are planned by urban policies through master plans. For sustainable development of the city, these two processes must follow each other, but in reality, they may spatially diverge and be inconsistent. Impact of this divergence on temperature patterns is studied in this paper by taking the example of the city of Bengaluru. Divergence between urbanisation (socio-economic) and planning processes has transformed terrain elements like water and vegetation, which in turn have transformed temperature patterns. The results in this study show how soil moisture is an important factor in influencing temperature pattern though there was good vegetation cover. Urbanisation processes have led to the disappearance of surface water bodies and depletion of groundwater, along with the change in vegetation, which have affected soil moisture content over the years. These analyses suggest the importance of understanding terrain conditions in urban planning. Keywords Urban planning · Temperature patterns · Divergence · Transformation · Terrain · Bengaluru
1 Introduction Rising temperature in cities, as a consequence of urbanisation, has attained greater attention worldwide. Urban areas with a higher temperature than the surrounding rural areas have set forth the debate on urban heat islands in the last decade (Weng 2001; Voogt and Oke 2003; Shastri et al. 2017). This condition is often attributed to an increase in builtup area, paved surface and loss of vegetated area (Golden 2004). Transformation of the natural surface to artificial built-up surface due to socio-economic processes has not only reduced rainwater penetration into the earth’s surface but also has affected the groundwater condition (Ramachandra and Mujumdar 2009). Loss of green surface has aggravated the situation further. It is commonly believed that vegetation and green cover can mitigate temperature rise; hence, importance was given to increase tree canopy in urban planning (Ali * N. S. Nalini [email protected] 1
National Institute of Advanced Studies, IISc Campus, Mattikere, Bangalore 560012, India
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
N. S. Nalini
Binte and Patnaik 2019). While soil heats up faster and cools down faster, trees have low temperature both during the day and night time compared to other anthropogenic surfaces (Mathew et al. 2018). Hence, several constructive measures were undertaken to improve green cover, and as a result, it is observed that in many cities vegetation and green cover have increased (Nagendra et al. 2012). Due to these measures taken, cities should have regained earlier salubrious climate, instead temperature further increased in majority of the cities due to climate change (Watkins et al. 2007). Cities with salubrious climate
Data Loading...
