Abstract: The rapid growth of urbanization has put heavy pressure on the land and its surrounding resources, reduction of vegetation cover, open spaces and serious social and environmental problems. Therefore, a basic step for managing and planning urban growth, as well as evaluating its cumulative effects, is to study and simulate the physical growth of the city. The purpose of this study is to understand the factors that influence the physical growth in Tehran on the basis of sustainable urban development in terms of environmental dimension and the preservation of environmental conditions in the next two decades. For this, using Landsat multi-temporal satellite imagery and object-based classification, land-use was assessed during the period from 1990 to 2015. In the next step, using the multi-criteria analysis model and the environment-based growth model, the impact of independent variables on urban growth, including 18 variables, was calculated from 1990 to 2015 and the map of urbanization potential was produced. Then the area of change for the expected year was predicted quantitatively using the Markov chain analysis. Finally, using Cellular Automata model, urban growth simulation for 2015 was performed with relative accuracy of 0.91 and Kappa coefficient of 0.87, and this model was used to estimate urban growth in 2025. The results show that urban growth will accelerate in 2025, as in the period 2003-2015, and often in the western and northeastern parts of the city, if the nature and extent of the impact of factors affecting urban growth will remain constant.
Keywords: Urban growth modelling, cellular automata, object-based classification, Tehran
