Peri-urban real estate, land-use changes, and sustainability challenges in Bangalore: lessons from the Global South

Peri-urbanization in rapidly growing cities of the Global South is increasingly driven not only by demographic growth but by escalating inner-city land and housing prices that push households and developers toward peripheral zones. Bangalore exemplifies this transition, where housing affordability pressures, speculative real estate investment, and weak land governance interact to transform agricultural landscapes into fragmented built-up clusters. Using satellite imagery (1991–2024), census data, and GIS-based land-use classification, this study quantifies peri-urban expansion across eight clusters in the Bangalore Metropolitan Region. The results show rapid built-up growth, agricultural land decline, and increasing spatial fragmentation, reflecting processes of extended urbanization beyond formal city boundaries. These transformations produce environmental stress, infrastructure deficits, and socio-spatial inequalities. The paper situates Bangalore within planetary urbanization debates and argues that peri-urban sustainability depends on land market regulation, spatial planning capacity, and data-driven governance.