Peri-Urban Expansion in the Maputo City Region: Land Access and Middle-Class Advances

The global urban population is expected to grow by 2.5 billion over the next three decades, and 90% of this growth will occur in African and Asian countries. Urban expansion in these regions is often characterised by ‘informal urbanization’ whereby households self-build without planning permission in contexts of ambiguous, insecure or disputed property rights. Despite the scale of informal urbanization, it has received little attention from scholars working in the domains of urban analytics and city science. Towards addressing this gap, we introduce TI-City, an urban growth model designed to predict the locations, legal status and socio-economic status of future residential developments in an African city. In a bottom-up approach, we use agent-based and cellular automata modelling techniques to predict the geospatial behaviour of key urban development actors, including households, real estate developers and government. We apply the model to the city-region of Accra, Ghana, drawing on local data collection, including a household survey, to parameterise the model. Using a multi-spatial-scale validation technique, we compare TI-City’s ability to simulate historically observed built-up patterns with SLEUTH, a highly popular urban growth model. Results show that TI-City outperforms SLEUTH at each scale, suggesting the model could offer a valuable decision support tool in similar city contexts.

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Mapping the morphology of sprawl and blight: A note on entropy

GeoScape ◽

10.2478/geosc-2021-0001 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 15 (1) ◽

pp. 1-18

Author(s):

Reza Banai ◽

Anzhelika Antipova ◽

Ehsan Momeni

Keyword(s):

Land Use ◽

Land Cover ◽

Urban Expansion ◽

Entropy Change ◽

Metropolitan Region ◽

List Type ◽

Block Group ◽

City Region ◽

City Center ◽

The City

Abstract The urban expansion from the city center to the suburb and beyond is indicated by Shannon entropy, a robust and versatile measure of sprawl. However, the metropolitan regionwide entropy masks the morphology of land cover and land use consequential to urban expansion within the city-region. To surmount the limitation, we focus on the block-group, which is a US census defined socio-spatial unit that identifies the metropolitan region’s development pattern structurally, forming tracts that comprise neighborhoods. The concentration and dispersion of land use and land cover by block-group reveals a North American metropolitan region’s commonly known but rarely measured spatial structure of its urban and suburban sprawl. We use parcel data from county assessor of property (GIS) and land cover pixel data from the National Land Cover Data (NLCD) to compute block-group land-use and land-cover entropy. The change in block group entropy over a decade indicates whether the city- region’s land use and land cover transition to a concentrated or dispersed pattern. Furthermore, we test a hypothesis that blight correlates with sprawl. Blight and sprawl are among the key factors that plague the metropolitan region. We determine the correlations with household income as well as (block group) distance from the city center. It turns out, blight is among the universally held distance-decay phenomena. The share of the block group’s blighted properties decays (nonlinearly) with distance from the city center. Highlights for public administration, management and planning: • The metropolitan region’s outward growth is highlighted by mapping the changing morphology of the block group within the city-region. • The block group entropy is computed with land use (parcel) and land cover (pixel) data. • The block group entropy change indicates the pattern of the land use and land cover transition with concentration or dispersion. • We test the hypothesis that blight correlates with sprawl with statistical models. • The block group’s blighted properties decrease (nonlinearly) with distance from the city center.

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Ancient and current resilience in the Chengdu Plain: Agropolitan development re-‘revisited’

Urban Studies ◽

10.1177/0042098019843020 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 57 (7) ◽

pp. 1372-1397 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Daniel B Abramson

Keyword(s):

Forest Cover ◽

Agricultural Landscape ◽

Landscape Heterogeneity ◽

Irrigation System ◽

Urban Expansion ◽

Flood Management ◽

Ecological Resilience ◽

City Region ◽

Chengdu Plain ◽

Landscape Preservation

The Dujiangyan irrigation system, China’s largest, is one of the world’s most important examples of sustainable agropolitan development, maintained by a relatively decentralised system of governance that minimises bureaucratic oversight and depends on significant local autonomy at many scales down to the household. At its historic core in the Chengdu Plain, the system has supported over 2000 years of near-continuously stable urban culture, as well as some of the world’s highest sustained long-term per-hectare productivity and diversity of grain and other crops, especially considering its high population density, forest cover, general biodiversity and flood management success. During the past decade, rapid urban expansion has turned the Chengdu Plain from a net grain exporter into a grain importer, and has radically transformed its productive functioning and distinctive scattered settlement pattern, reorganising much of the landscape into larger, corporately-managed farms, and more concentrated and infrastructure-intensive settlements of non-farming as well as farming households. Community-scale case studies of spatial-morphological and household socio-economic variants on the regional trend help to articulate what is at stake. Neither market-driven ‘laissez-faire’ rural development nor local state-driven spatial settlement consolidation and corporatisation of production seem to correlate well with important factors of resilience: landscape heterogeneity; crop diversity and food production; permaculture; and flexibility in household independence and choice of livelihood. Management of the irrigation system should be linked to community-based agricultural landscape preservation and productive dwelling, as sources of adaptive capacity crucial to the social-ecological resilience of the city-region, the nation and perhaps all humanity.

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Searching for theOasis in Life: Fashion and the Question of Female Emancipation in Late Nineteenth-Century Argentina

The Americas A Quarterly Review of Latin American History ◽

10.1353/tam.2004.0028 ◽

2004 ◽

Vol 60 (3) ◽

pp. 363-390 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Regina A. Root

Keyword(s):

Middle Class ◽

Family Life ◽

Buenos Aires ◽

Writing Process ◽

Urban Expansion ◽

Conspiracy Theory ◽

Late Nineteenth Century ◽

Female Characters ◽

Happy Ending ◽

Late Nineteenth

One day, a young romance writer who has lost his place to urban expansion in Buenos Aires overhears this intimate conversation coming from another bedroom in an all-women's residence hall. An “invisible houseguest” in Madame Bazan'spensionadofor middle-class women of all ages, Mauricio Ridel works on finishing a happy ending for his latest serialized novel. During the writing process, however, he finds himself distracted by the sounds and rhythms of the house, his focus carried away to the conversations in the house on fashion, family life and female emancipation. Careful not to indicate his presence in any way (for he has agreed to respect the privacy of the women who live there), Ridel listens in to the conversations between female residents from the comfort of his assigned room. Believing themselves removed from male listeners, the female characters of Juana Manuela Gorriti'sOasis en la vida(1888) openly discuss their concerns and desires in the security of enclosed spaces. The dialogic sequence that begins this essay demonstrates the relief that a group of unnamed women experience when removing their uncomfortable clothing. They complain about the weight and needless complexity of their fashions and even flesh out a conspiracy theory concerning a few of those crazy designers. As the women contemplate the changes that tomorrow's fashions will inevitably bring, their soft, sweet voices appear punctuated by the incongruous thud of tossed garments.

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