Modelling future urban scenarios in developing countries: an application case study in Lagos, Nigeria

We consider urban sustainability issues in developing countries, with a focus on urban growth. The need for urban management tools that are able to provide prospective scenarios is addressed. Urban simulations can represent a useful approach to understanding the consequences of current planning policies-or their incompleteness. Nevertheless, simulations of future urban growth are usually quite difficult without tools which embrace the complexity of the urban system. We describe an urban-growth simulation for the city of Lagos in Nigeria, in which an urban cellular automata (CA) prototype is used. We propose a bottom-up approach which integrates land-use factors with the dynamic approach of CA for modelling future urban land-use scenarios. The model for Lagos was calibrated and tested with the aid of measured time-series data on land use, through a set of spatial metrics and kappa-coefficients. A twenty-year simulation, until 2020, was run. The simulation results are realistic and achieve a high level of detail, confirming the effectiveness of the proposed model.