Urban sustainability in developing countries' megacities: modelling and predicting future urban growth in Lagos

In the first part of the paper urban sustainability issues in African countries are considered 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 an understanding of the consequences of current planning policies or their incompleteness. Simulations of future urban growth are usually quite difficult without tools that embrace the complexity of the urban system. The second part of this paper describes an urban growth simulation for the city of Lagos in Nigeria using a dynamic spatial model prototype. We propose a bottom-up approach, integrating land-use factors with a dynamic approach for modelling future urban land-use scenarios. The model for Lagos was calibrated and tested using measured time-series data on land-use, through a set of spatial metrics and Kappa (K) coefficients. Afterwards, a twenty-year simulation was run until 2020. The simulation results are realistic and relatively accurate, confirming the effectiveness of the proposed model. This work was performed in the framework of the European Commission's MOLAND project. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.