ASSESSING INFRASTRUCTURE DEVELOPMENT AND URBAN SUSTAINABILITY IN THE ITANAGAR CAPITAL REGION: AN INTEGRATED GEOSPATIAL AND SECONDARY-DATA FRAMEWORK

Abstract

Rapid urbanization in India's Himalayan state capitals has intensified infrastructure investment, yet whether such investment translates into spatially balanced and environmentally sustainable development remains inadequately examined. This study develops and demonstrates an integrated geospatial and secondary-data framework to assess infrastructure development and urban sustainability at the ward level in the Itanagar Capital Region (ICR), Arunachal Pradesh. An Infrastructure Development Index (IDI) comprising 23 indicators across seven dimensions and an Urban Sustainability Index (USI) comprising 19 indicators across five dimensions were constructed using Min–Max normalization and equal-weight aggregation, with environmental indicators derived from Sentinel-2, ESA WorldCover and MODIS imagery processed in Google Earth Engine. The two indices were classified into five ordinal categories and their relationship examined through Pearson correlation and simple linear regression. Across the 20 wards analysed, infrastructure development was strongly and positively associated with urban sustainability (r = 0.889, 95% CI [0.735, 0.955], p < 0.001; USI = 0.233 + 0.505·IDI, R² = 0.790), yet the two indices diverged in class for eleven of twenty wards, and ward-level green cover was inversely related to infrastructure (r = -0.893). Infrastructure was concentrated in the urban core while a green-cover sustainability floor persisted in the periphery, indicating that infrastructure-led development is necessary but not sufficient for sustainable urban outcomes. The framework offers a transferable, low-cost tool for diagnosing intra-urban infrastructure inequality and infrastructure–sustainability linkages in data-scarce Himalayan cities.