Characterizing Urban Expansion of Small Cities in Nigeria and Democratic Republic of The Congo Using Landsat Time Series

Abstract

Urbanization dynamics of small cities and towns are understudied, especially for countries in Africa. In this study, we use dense Landsat time series data to extract urban expansion dynamics of small cities and towns in Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and then conduct spatio-temporal analysis to characterize the obtained urban expansion. Our results show that the proposed methodology effectively extracted urban expansion of small cities with acceptable accuracy. Small cities experience patterns and rates of urban expansion that are markedly different from larger cities.