A spatio-temporalretrospective of theurban sprawlof Annaba (Algeria)

Abstract

Urban sprawl is a phenomenon with a negative effect which, over time, consumes the living environment . The aim of this research is to analyze and evaluate the urban sprawl of Annaba situated at the northeastern part of Algeria in a diachronic approach. The studied area contains twelve agglomerations. Through the supervised classification of a time series of data provided by multi spectral sensors mounted on LANDSAT 8 Operati onal Land Imager (OLI), LANDSAT 7 Thematic Mapper Plus satellite platforms (ETM +) and L ANDSAT 45 Thematic Mapper (TM) the urban sprawl was examined in different periods of 1987, 2013 and 2017, on different scales. This study displayed that a retrospective understanding of the timing and magnitude of Annaba sprawl in a spatio temporal dimension allows updating the phenomenon to better manage it in the future on either macro or micro scale as a decision support tool.