Abstract
This paper assesses the effects of urban expansion of Ile-Ife city and appraises the changes that occurred in the landscape from 1986 to 2009. The study made use of information extracted from Landsat TM 1986, ETM+ 2002 and Ikonos 2009 images. GPS observations of notable points within and around the city were overlaid on the topographic map and on the satellite imageries in order to appraise the changes in the land use and land cover over the period. The land consumption was analyzed using the computed land consumption rate (LCR) and land absorption coefficient (LAC) from 1986 to 2009. The average annual rate of urban expansion of Ile-Ife is 3.5% which translated to a gain of 2256.7 ha in the surrounding rural areas from 1986 to 2002 and about 1434.7 ha between 2002 and 2009. The land is being transformed as shown by the land consumption rate which progressed from 1.1% in 1986 to 1.2% in 2002 and remained stable till 2009. The land absorption coefficient has increased from 0.013 to 0.014, confirming the high demand for land both within the city and in the suburbs.Keywords: Urban Sprawl; Land Consumption Rate; Land Absorption Coefficient, Ile-Ife; Remote Sensing
Highlights
The United Nations (UN) Population Division projected that by 2030, each of the major regions of the developing world will hold more urban than rural dwellers and by 2050, two-thirds of their inhabitants are likely to live in urban areas (Montgomery, 2008)
The annual rate of urban expansion is an average of 3.5% per year which translated to a gain of 2256.7 ha from 1986 to 2002 and about 1434.7 ha between 2002 and 2009
Despite the debate about urban sprawl, this paper has addressed the reality of cities expansion in Nigeria, calling for necessary planning policy as pointed out by Zubair (2008) and Olaleye et al (2012) in separate studies in Ilorin where the land consumption rate is similar to that of Ile-Ife
Summary
The United Nations (UN) Population Division projected that by 2030, each of the major regions of the developing world will hold more urban than rural dwellers and by 2050, two-thirds of their inhabitants are likely to live in urban areas (Montgomery, 2008). Many developing countries, especially in sub-Sahara Africa, are experiencing more and more rapid urbanization (United Nations, 2013), which is contributing immensely to urban sprawl in both major and minor cities. Urban sprawl is commonly described as the spreading of a city to its suburbs It is the construction of residential and commercial buildings in the adjoining rural areas or otherwise undeveloped lands at the outskirts of a city (wiseGEEK, 2003). The first type is characterized by large peri-urban areas with informal and illegal patterns of land use. In these peri-urban areas, there is a lack of infrastructural facilities and basic services, and there is little or no public transport while access roads are inadequate. Some scholars advocated that urban sprawl process has led to a cohort of environmental problems ranging from social segregation to environmental degradations (Squires, 2002; Burchell, 2002) for which appropriate solutions are still needed regarding the growing concern for sustainability (Ewing, 1997)
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