A review of the application and implications of cellular automata-based urban growth model in Africa

ABSTRACT

Africa’s urbanization rate has quadrupled from 14% in 1950 to about 44% in 2022. A variety of urban growth models have been used to measure and monitor urbanization, its drivers and implications for urban planning and sustainability. This paper reviews the performance of various Cellular Automata (CA)-based urban growth models and their implications for the urbanization processes in Africa. To this end, we employ a systematic review approach to identify the final 18 articles published in Web of Science-indexed journals until 2022. Our review found that the CA-based urban growth model has been successfully used in Africa to track the impacts of urban growth, assess different city growth scenarios and compare the performance of various CA-integrated models. Yet, most of the reviewed CA-based studies have focused on more urbanized regions of the continent. The result also reveals that integrating the CA model with other statistical methods improves its broader application and practicality than a conventional CA model. Our findings give planners, policymakers, and other urban stakeholders a more in-depth understanding of the challenges of unplanned urbanization and the need for meaningful participation from urban stakeholders in city growth and sustainable land use management that balances urban growth and the environment.

KEYWORDS:

• Africa
• cellular automata
• sustainability
• urbanization
• urban growth model

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the VLIR-UOS project for the collaboration made through Bahir Dar University – Institutional University Cooperation (BDU-IUC) program. We also appreciate anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedbacks in improving the review.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

CRediT author statement

MBF: Conceptualization, Methodology, Analysis, Writing-Original draft preparation, Data curation, ASM: Writing – Reviewing and Editing.