Urban Growth Evaluation by Coupling Descriptive Analysis and Zipf’s Rank-Size Model in Parakou (Benin)

Maurille Paul Lanmandjèkpogni

doi:10.11648/j.urp.20190401.11

Abstract

Parakou occupies a strategic place in the socio-economic development of Benin due to its geographical position. Based on the Urban Land Registry data, and census data from the National Institute of Statistics and Applied Economics coupling with the statistical description and adjustment to the distribution Zipf rank-size model, allowed us to describe the urban hierarchy on the scale of Parakou localities over the period 1979 to 2013. The changes in densities of population occupation per decade show a tendency to sprawl from the 2000s and linear and quadratic adjustments are satisfactory (linear: 0.81≤ R² ≤ 0.95 and quadratic: 0.95 ≤ R2 ≤ 0.98) and significant at 1% (P-value = 0.000) to 88%. The linear coefficients of Pareto are continuously decreasing (ǀαǀ = 1.749 to ǀαǀ = 0.831 between 1979 and 2002), and reflect that the weight of big cities keeps an influence on small and medium-sized cities over this period, while a slight increase was observed in the courtyard of the decade from 2002 to 2013 (ǀαǀ = 0.861 in 2013) and shows the effect of the creation of new districts with the gradual loss of the influence of the old districts of the central core. The results suggest that population growth of the city is occurred with urban sprawl controlled by exogenous factors of infrastructures or land type. Managements of spatial planning structures are then arrested in the guidelines to provide land for the human impacts control on natural resources of watersheds.

Highlights

The strong growth observed and predicted in developing countries, added to water resource pressures in the new global context justifies the interest of several research works in recent years [1,2,3,4,5,6]
“Table 1” below, shows a temporal evaluation of the variations of some demographic indicators and growth which are: the density of the population, the total number of the people and the land are occupied by the population in the administrative division of the city
The P_2 phase, the population numbers have continued to grow, there is negative growth in densities despite the space consumption of more than 30 hectares between districts 1 and 3, and only 5ha in the district 2. This phase is characterized by a spreading districts 1 and 2, and a settlement of stability in the district 3 where the density did not change between 1992 and 2002 despite digital growth in 1243 inhabitants

Summary

Introduction

The strong growth observed and predicted in developing countries, added to water resource pressures in the new global context justifies the interest of several research works in recent years [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Developing countries, Benin, are still poorly informed about their growth and urban sprawl, and often even the resulting extra costs for development needs [13]. Anthropogenic pressures on local water resources are still poorly quantified [17]. In this context, the urban water cycle presents great risk of malfunction in the coming years if no management action of spatial planning is taken. According to voirion-canicio, it is for the scientific world, to help lay the prerequisites for designing relevant and robust urban sustainability indicators required for urban eve [18]

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Conclusion