In India, urban settlements, especially metropolitan cities, are expanding at a rapid pace, transforming non-built-up areas into built-up landscapes inducing various irreversible environmental consequences. A metropolis generally is composed of statutory urban areas at the core and rural or periurban areas at the periphery, with various differences to the core. Therefore, simultaneous study of growth dynamics of different parts in the same metropolis, namely metropolitan urban (core), and metropolitan rural (periphery) seems to be important for effective urban planning. This study attempts to assess the built-up dynamics of the Kolkata Metropolitan Area (KMA) in India using a proposed zoning approach; that is, three different spatial levels of KMA—KMA-Total (the entire KMA), KMA-Urban (metropolitan urban), and KMA-Panchayet (metropolitan rural)—for the time period between 1980 and 2010 employing Shannon's entropy and some other landscape metrics integrated with Remote Sensing and Geographical Information System. The results show that the built-up expansion of KMA-Total is gradually becoming compact over time. But, within KMA, built-up growth of KMA-Urban has declined sharply, becoming more compact, whereas, KMA-Panchayet is experiencing a higher degree of built-up growth featured by dispersed and fragmented growth. Importantly, the zoning approach proposed in this study appears to be an effective one to analyze spatiotemporal built-up dynamics in large cities.