- Modelling Informal Urban Growth - A contribution to strategic urban development in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania    613 kb by    Hill, Alexandra & Lindner, Christian | christian.lindner@udo.edu    Short Outline The presented model aims at simulating future urban growth largely confined to informal land development. Future land-use patterns as a consequence of selected planning scenarios are being evaluated with a view towards strategic planning options. Abstract Commonly, residential location decisions mainly follow the principle of utility maximisation, but particularly in developing countries they are also highly determined by survivalist strategies. Informal land markets in Tanzania are to a large extent subject to social ties and the availability and transparency of information that can both basically be experienced on a local-scale neighbourhood level. On the macro scale, the location decisions of informal urban settlers lead to rapid urban sprawl extending the fast growing urban agglomerations of Sub-Saharan Africa into the unplanned periphery at unparalleled pace. This contribution presents research on informal urban growth processes focussing on the case of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Local planning is unable to cope with the pace of urban development. As a consequence more than three quarters of the urban population reside in informally developed settlements. The research focuses on the aggregate outcomes of informal residential location decisions and has been carried out within the context of designing a CA-based land-use model to simulate land-use changes as well as future development scenarios. The model developed considers various determinants and drivers of informal rapid urban growth under poverty. In such environments appropriate data and information are often missing or out-of-date. Although the chosen modelling approach for the CA-based land-use model of Dar es Salaam did not require a sophisticated spatial database, the availability of historic datasets was crucial to the process of model calibration and turned out to be challenging in a data-poor environment. Pragmatic approaches were needed to integrate informal land development into the model. The results target urban planners and decision makers by contributing knowledge on the drivers and determinants of informal urban growth. This is essential to intervene in informal urban development given the limited resources at hand and to enable them to better cope with future urban development. Keywords informal urban growth, strategic planning, GIS, urban modelling, CA Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2010: Sustainable City - Developing World   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper