Monitoring urban growth in greater Lagos : a case study using GIS to monitor the urban growth of Lagos 1990 - 2008 and produce future growth prospects for the city

Sammanfattning: The aim of this thesis is to show how the city of Lagos has grown in size and population between the years 1990-2008. Comparisons over the city for the years 1990, 1999 and 2008 have been made so that the main characteristics of the city’s growth can be shown and analyzed. Based on this expansion future prospects for the city has been provided through producing three different scenarios on how Lagos might look in the year 2020. The study has been conducted through remote sensing where satellite images over the city have been acquired; these images have been edited and combined with population data so that demographical comparisons can be done. The results indicate that the city has experienced an extreme growth, both in area and in population. The growth has however been more characterized by an expansion in area than population increase. Over the total study time the population in the city more than doubled from around five million inhabitants in 1990 to over ten million in 2008, during the same time period the city expanded almost three times in size. The lack of high resolution satellite data and the fact that the population figures used is based on estimates however create some unreliability in the results. That the city has experienced growth over the study time was not surprising since it is the type of region that has grown the fastest in the world during the last decades, an urban area in a developing country.