<p>Urbanization in small and medium towns drives significant transformations in land systems, affecting ecological integrity, agricultural productivity, and sustainable land management. This study presents a detailed spatial and temporal assessment of land use and land cover (LULC) dynamics and urban sprawl in Kathua City, a Himalayan foothill town, spanning three decades. Multi-temporal Landsat imagery was systematically pre-processed and classified using supervised Maximum Likelihood Classification to generate high-accuracy LULC maps, which were validated through standard accuracy assessments. Spatial patterns of urban expansion were analyzed through quadrant-based and concentric buffer approaches to identify directional biases and radial growth trends. Normalized Shannon Entropy (NSE) was applied to quantify the degree of spatial dispersion and heterogeneity in urban morphology over time. Findings reveal substantial reconfiguration of the urban landscape, with agricultural and vegetative lands progressively supplanted by built-up areas and expansion concentrated along transport corridors and peri-urban margins. NSE analysis indicates a moderately dispersed urban form, reflecting simultaneous densification of the urban core and peripheral diffusion. The results underscore the complex, non-uniform nature of urban growth in Himalayan foothill towns and highlight the interplay between infrastructural development and land transformation. Integrating geospatial techniques with entropy-based metrics provides a robust, quantitative framework for diagnosing urbanization processes and guiding evidence-based planning. These insights offer actionable strategies for sustainable urban development, ecological preservation, and optimized land use management, establishing a replicable methodology for examining urban sprawl in comparable small and medium peri-urban contexts.</p>