A tridecadal geospatial analysis of urban growth of ikire town nigeria

Abstract

The modern world is facing a continuous flow of development, and this increasing development is an evolving process that accelerates urban growth. Contemporary issues of urban growth are common in developing countries where development goes ahead of urban planning. This study assesses the urban growth in Ikire, Nigeria, between three decades of year 2000, 2010, and 2020 with a view to detecting and measuring the presence of urban growth for the purpose of managing the sustainability. The data used for the study were Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) data of 2000, 2010 and operational land imager of 2020. The remote sensing technique was integrated with the Geographical Information System (GIS) to assess land use and land cover (LULC) changes, spatial dispersion, and compactness of urban growth in the study area. The Landsat images of 2000, 2010, and 2020 were subjected to appropriate corrections, processing, and supervised maximum likelihood pixel-based classification into five land cover classes. The extent of urban land use was determined by using the attribute and statistical data generated from the classification result for a post-classification comparison of the built-up LULC among the years. Results show that the built-up area highly increased from 9% in 2000 to about 13% in 2010, and 15.7% in 2020. It is expected that by the year 2060, the built-up area would have grown to 38% at a rate of 9.5% per decade and approximately 1% per annum. The findings in the study indicated that in the past decades, the built-up area has been on the increase, thus indicating urban growth in the study area, and this has impacted the natural environment. A possible consequence of urban sprawl was identified. The use of geospatial technologies for assessing and monitoring the pace of urban sprawl and LULC change dynamics in Ikire to manage and control the unplanned, inevitable urban sprawl in the study area was recommended. Key words: built-up, urban-growth, land-use, land-cover, urban-sprawl.