Land-use planning for sustainable urban development in Africa: a spatial and multi-objective optimization approach

Abstract

Land-use planning, which requires finding a balance among different conflicting social, economic and environment factors, is a complex task needed everywhere, including Africa. One example is the city of Zanzibar in Tanzania, which is under special consideration for land-use revision. From one side, the city has high potentials for tourist industry and at the other side there are major challenges with the city structure and poor accessibilities. In order to prepare a proper land-use plan for the city, a variety of influencing conflicting factors needs to be considered and satisfied. This can be regarded as a common problem in many African cities, which are under development. This paper aims to address the problem by proposing and demonstrating the use of Geographical Information System (GIS) and multi-objective optimization for land-use planning, in Zanzibar as a case study. The measures which have been taken by Zanzibar government to address the development challenges through the Zanzibar Strategy for Growth and Reduction of Poverty (ZSGRP) were identified by studying related documents and interviewing experts. Based on these, two objective functions were developed for land-use planning. Optimum base land-use plans were developed and mapped by optimizing the objective functions using the NSGA-II algorithm. The results show that the proposed approach and outputs can considerably facilitate land-use planning in Zanzibar. Similar approaches are highly recommended for other cities in Africa which are under development.

Keywords

• Multi-Objective Optimization
• Land-Use Planning
• Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm-II (NSGA-II)
• Zanzibar
• Africa