This project aimed to quantify urban sprawl in Lagos, Nigeria. Dividing the rate of change in new urban development between two time periods by the rate of population change between the same two time periods left us with a quantifiable indication of how much Lagos sprawled over time relative to its population growth.

By assessing the impact of this growing population boom, we hope to bring attention to the broader implications of urban sprawl, especially in the case of cities whose infrastructures cannot support the combination of booming populations and land use. A variety of remote sensing and image processing techniques, such as identifying areas with the highest proportion of land consumption as seen in the kernel density map, can assist planners and decision-makers in making the soundest infrastructural and social judgements possible for a wealth of international cities. Download the full text below.