Browsing by Author "Cobbinah, Patrick Brandful"

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On the absurdity of rapid urbanization: Spatio-temporal analysis of land-use changes in Morogoro, Tanzania
(Cities, 2020-07-07) Sumari, Neema S.; Cobbinah, Patrick Brandful; Ujoh, Fanan; Xu, Gang
This study questions the frequent overemphasis on population growth aspects of African urbanization with little consideration of the spatial extent by analyzing the influence of population growth on the spatial expansion of the Morogoro urban municipality (MUM) in Tanzania between 2000 and 2016. Shannon's Entropy, a random forest supervised classifier, and spatial analysis were adopted to analyze Multi-temporal Landsat images obtained through the Google Earth Engine platform to quantify the spatial and temporal distribution and pattern of land-use change. Findings from this research show that Shannon's entropy values for MUM increased from 0.522 in 2000, to 0.761 in 2007, and to 0.901 in 2016 with the urban land cover recording a considerable and consistent increase. Similarly, the municipality's annual rate of change in population decreased from 4.17% in 1967 to 3.81% in 2016, and is estimated to rise to 4.54% by 2030 with a corresponding population of 25,262 in 1967 and 622,000 in 2016. From the results, the rate of population growth is not commensurate with the rate of spatial expansion, as the spatial extent is more than twice the population growth. An important contribution from this research relates to the limited attention to the faster rate of urban expansion compared to population growth in African cities; a situation that is inconsistent with sustainable and resilient urban futures. It is recommended that municipal authorities should consider initiatives (e.g., environmental planning models) to reverse the current trend of urban growth in order to improve the health, density, sustainability and resilience of the urban environment.
Urban expansion and form changes across African cities with a global outlook: Spatiotemporal analysis of urban land densities
(Journal of Cleaner Production, 2019-03-27) Xu, Gang; Dong, Ting; Cobbinah, Patrick Brandful; Jiao, Limin; Sumari, Neema S.; Chai, Baohui; Liu, Yaolin
Africa has been experiencing rapid urbanization, yet limited studies have systematically investigated urban growth dynamics across African cities. Using 25 cities as cases, we quantified urban growth and form changes in Africa via spatiotemporal analysis of urban land densities in concentric rings over three time points (1990, 2000, and 2014). The results show that African cities have rapidly grown both in population and built-up areas, which increased by about 4% and more than 5% per annum, respectively. Urban land density (defined as the proportion of the built-up area to the buildable area) in each concentric ring decreases from the city center to the urban periphery with diverse patterns among cities. Comparatively, small cities have a lower urban land density and a more dispersed urban form than medium-sized and large cities in Africa. The international comparisons between cities with over one million population in Africa, Asia (e.g., China and India), Europe, and North America (i.e., the United States) reveal that African cities have a relatively less compact urban form. Implications of these findings for the future of African cities are further proffered.