TITLE:
Monitoring Urban Spatial Growth in Harare Metropolitan Province, Zimbabwe
AUTHORS:
Courage Kamusoko, Jonah Gamba, Hitomi Murakami
KEYWORDS:
Harare Metropolitan Province; Zimbabwe; Urbanization; Support Vector Machines (SVMs); Urban Sprawl
JOURNAL NAME:
Advances in Remote Sensing,
Vol.2 No.4,
December
16,
2013
ABSTRACT: Taking Harare metropolitan province in Zimbabwe as an example, we
classified Landsat imagery (1984, 2002, 2008 and 2013) by using support
vector machines (SVMs) and
analyzed built-up and non-built-up changes. The overall classification accuracy for the four dates ranged
from 89% to 95%, while the overall kappa varied from 86% to 93%. The results
demonstrate that SVMs provide a cost-effective technique for mapping urban land use/cover by using mediumresolution satellite images such
as Landsat. Based on
land use/cover maps for 1984, 2002, 2008 and 2013, along with change analyses,
built-up areas increased from 12.6% to 36.3% of the total land area, while non-built-up cover decreased from 87.3% to 63.4% between 1984 and 2013. The results revealed
an urban growth process characterized by infill, extension and leapfrog
developments. Given the dearth of spatial urban growth
information in Harare metropolitan province, the land
use/cover maps are valuable products that provide a synoptic view of built-up
and non-built-up areas. Therefore, the land use/cover change maps could
potentially assist decision-makers with up-to-date built-up and non-built-up
information in order to guide strategic implementation of sustainable urban land use
planning in Harare metropolitan province.