干旱区生态环境知识资源中心

This paper examines the state of the sustainability and the urban sprawl phenomenon of an Algerian Oasis city. Our purpose is to analyse sustainability and sprawl in M'zab valley through measuring its impact on the environment by using indicators. The work consists of three parts: firstly, analysis of the urbanization process of M'zab valley and identification of sprawl impacts through a cause-effect structure from literature investigation; secondly, a brief overview of sprawl land impact indicators in order to define the analysis framework and to chose the appropriate indicators to apply to our study case; finally, calculation of the land resource consumption indicator by measuring the land use change area amounts from 1968 to 1997 in M'zab valley using GIS.