Abstract: The agricultural land in Egypt is consistently threatened to diminish by the urban encroachment phenomenon, which extensively
occurred after the Egyptian Revolution in 2011. The risk is considered particularly high since the fertile and productive land of Egypt is
remarkably scarce and is profoundly shrinking due to the urban infringements. The unstable conditions of the country exceptionally allowed
planned and unplanned urban expansion forms to appear more and more. In this research urban expansion is studied by utilizing satellite
images with distinctly different resolutions and employing diverse remote sensing classification procedures. The analysis is based on a multitemporal
change detection procedure which identifies the urban expansion in terms of location and areal extent that occurred, comparing the
situation before and after the revolution.
For a regional overview regarding the areal extent of the urban expansion the results of unsupervised classification of Landsat images gave
most helpful hints. Furthermore, the results of supervised classification of GeoEye satellite images achieved the most satisfactory results in
determining the locations of newly-constructed buildings.