Abstract:
Urban expansion is a universal phenomenon taking place all around the globe which involve both
vertical and horizontal expansion of the physical structure of urban areas. The main objective of
this study was used to investigate urban expansion and its socio-economic impacts on peripheral
farming communities in Sodo town. This study employed primary and secondary sources of data
in order to achieve the stated objectives. GIS and remote sensing were used to analyze the
phenomena of agricultural land transformation into urban land use. The descriptive research
methods was employed and 327 systematically selected sample households from three peripheral
kebeles. SPSS software were used to analyze socioeconomic data. The change detection method
has been applied to investigate LULCC by using ERDAS IMAGINE 2015. The Maximum
Likelihood Algorithm of Supervised Classification has been used to generate land use/land cover
maps. The satellite image results show that built up areas increased by 285.93ha, 252.27ha and
457.47ha respectively in the first, the second and the entire study periods. While bare land, forest
cover and grass land have shown an observable decrease over the past 30 years, but agricultural
land increased from 8601ha in 1989 to 9235ha in 2019. Sodo Town is expanding to peripheral
keeeles in all direction that is basically driven by demographic and government induced factors.
The expansion of the town have both positive and negative impacts on peripheral farming
communities. Positively, the expansion program created job opportunities and better access to
social services than before. Loss of agricultural land, displacement of farmers from their original
residence and social disorder are the major negative impacts of urban expansion on peripheral
agricultural community those were driven by government policy, natural increase and migration.
