Today, India still remains a rural agricultural country although the share of urban population has also increased but these figures do not tell the whole story. There are evidences that urban growth is dispersed and urban sprawl promotes the spread of urban land use into the rural-urban fringe.

Here the attempt is to investigate the land transformation and the driving forces which were influencing the land transformation. The present study was done on peri urban interface of Aligarh city, a relatively small city, but as other north Indian cities, it is also expanding rapidly. Moreover, it too is surrounded by a populous rural area with productive and rich agricultural hinterland. Such conditions give rise to many conflicts and mutually beneficial complementarities in the rural and urban spheres.

The result shows that the demand for land is high which results in informal urban development fulfilling the requirements of many of the city s residents. Every piece of land is a tradable commodity, and the pursuit of short-term profits is the predominant ethic. The actors in PUI are strong because it is characterized by intermixing of rural and urban activities and interests as well as the number of actors are greater than in any other area.."

People in settlements need food, raw materials, and relaxation, the gaining of all of which involves exploiting the natural resources of the vicinity. The supply chains of modern cities are extensive and complex. Equally, urban demands affect land cover beyond their immediate vicinity, settlement expansion thus involves both a compact direct change in land cover and a widespread force affecting land cover and land use in other areas. Agriculture occupies a curiously paradoxical situation with respect to the natural environment. Despite the declining role of land in farm input structure in many regions, the increasing importance of capital for inputs in non-farm origins and the emergence of highly specialized 'factory' farms, agriculture continues to retain a strong link with the biophysical environment. The present study tries to study the agricultural activity in the surrounding Census Divisions of Montreal Metropolitan Region.

Settlement refers to the occupation of land for human living space. Settlements are places where people live and to which they bring materials for consumption and for transformation into other objects. Activities in settlements place demands on other lands and produce wastes out of proportion to their size. As land cover, settlement represents the most profound alteration of the natural environment by people, through the imposition of structures. Settlements also create demands that lead to other land-cover changes. The area of land actually covered by the structures of settlements is small, but it nevertheless marks the most massive change in the flows of energy, water, and materials on the earth's surface. The study analyzes the impact on physical (abiotic) eco system i.e. Land - Air - Water due to urbanization process in a growing urban centre in India.

Land (use) transformation is one of the most important fields of human induced environmental transformation, with an extensive history dating back to antiquity. Land transformation did not abate but, rather, accelerated and diversified with the onset of the Industrial Revolution, the globalization of the world economy and the expansion of population and technological capacity. Land transformations, although localized, contribute to wider reaching, including globally systemic, processes. Cities depend on the rural areas around them in many ways. The traditional models of (agricultural) land use around urban settlements such as that of Von Thunen, illustrate the way in which settlements affected the surrounding countryside in the early stages of urban growth. Nearby land is used, depending on culture and level of economic activity, but they involve little urban land cover on the land. The proposed study tries to investigate the impact of urbanization on land use dynamics in selected areas of the urban fringes of London.