skip to main content


Title: Identifying, projecting, and evaluating informal urban expansion spatial patterns
Informal urban land expansion is produced through a diversity of social and political transactions, yet ‘pixelizable’ data capturing these transactions is commonly unavailable. Understanding informal urbanization entails differentiating spatial patterns of informal settlement from formal growth, associating such patterns with the social transactions that produce them, and evaluating the social and environmental outcomes of distinct settlement types. Demonstrating causality between distinct urban spatial patterns and social-institutional processes requires both highresolution spatial temporal time-series data of urban change and insights into social transactions giving rise to these patterns. We demonstrate an example of linking distinct spatial patterns of informal urban expansion to the institutional processes each engenders in Mexico City. The approach presented here can be applied across cases, potentially improving land projection models in the rapidly urbanizing Global South, characterized by high informality. We conclude with a research agenda to identify, project, and evaluate informal urban expansion patterns.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1657773
NSF-PAR ID:
10312962
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Journal of Land Use Science
ISSN:
1747-423X
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. This dataset incorporates Mexico City related essential data files associated with Beth Tellman's dissertation: Mapping and Modeling Illicit and Clandestine Drivers of Land Use Change: Urban Expansion in Mexico City and Deforestation in Central America. It contains spatio-temporal datasets covering three domains; i) urban expansion from 1992-2015, ii) district and section electoral records for 6 elections from 2000-2015, iii) land titling (regularization) data for informal settlements from 1997-2012 on private and ejido land. The urban expansion data includes 30m resolution urban land cover for 1992 and 2013 (methods published in Goldblatt et al 2018), and a shapefile of digitized urban informal expansion in conservation land from 2000-2015 using the Worldview-2 satellite. The electoral records include shapefiles with the geospatial boundaries of electoral districts and sections for each election, and .csv files of the number of votes per party for mayoral, delegate, and legislature candidates. The private land titling data includes the approximate (in coordinates) location and date of titles given by the city government (DGRT) extracted from public records (Diario Oficial) from 1997-2012. The titling data on ejido land includes a shapefile of georeferenced polygons taken from photos in the CORETT office or ejido land that has been expropriated by the government, and including an accompany .csv from the National Agrarian Registry detailing the date and reason for expropriation from 1987-2007. Further details are provided in the dissertation and subsequent article publication (Tellman et al 2021). The Mexico City portion of these data were generated via a National Science Foundation sponsored project (No. 1657773, DDRI: Mapping and Modeling Clandestine Drivers of Urban Expansion in Mexico City). The project P.I. is Beth Tellman with collaborators at ASU (B.L Turner II and Hallie Eakin). Other collaborators include the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), at the Institute of Geography via Dr. Armando Peralta Higuera, who provided support for two students, Juan Alberto Guerra Moreno and Kimberly Mendez Gomez for validating the Landsat urbanization algorithm. Fidel Serrano-Candela, at the UNAM Laboratory of the National Laboratory for Sustainability Sciences (LANCIS) also provided support for urbanization algorithm development and validation, and Rodrigo Garcia Herrera, who provided support for hosting data at LANCIS (at: http://patung.lancis.ecologia.unam.mx/tellman/). Additional collaborators include Enrique Castelán, who provided support for the informal urbanization data from SEDEMA (Ministry of the Environmental for Mexico City). Electoral, land titling, and land zoning data were digitized with support from Juana Martinez, Natalia Hernandez, Alexia Macario Sanchez, Enrique Ruiz Durazo, in collaboration with Felipe de Alba, at CESOP (Center of Social Studies and Public Opinion, at the Mexican Legislative Assembly). The data include geospatial time series data regarding changes in urban land cover, digitized electoral results, land titling, land zoning, and public housing. Additional funding for this work was provided by NSF under Grant No. 1414052, CNH: The Dynamics of Multiscalar Adaptation in Megacities (PI H. Eakin), and the NSF-CONACYT GROW fellowship NSF No. 026257-001 and CONACYT number 291303 (PI Bojórquez). References: Tellman, B., Eakin, H., Janssen, M.A., Alba, F. De, Ii, B.L.T., 2021. The Role of Institutional Entrepreneurs and Informal Land Transactions in Mexico City’s Urban Expansion. World Dev. 140, 1–44. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2020.105374 Goldblatt, R., Stuhlmacher, M.F., Tellman, B., Clinton, N., Hanson, G., Georgescu, M., Wang, C., Serrano-Candela, F., Khandelwal, A.K., Cheng, W.-H., Balling, R.C., 2018. Using Landsat and nighttime lights for supervised pixel-based image classification of urban land cover. Remote Sens. Environ. 205, 253–275. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2017.11.026 
    more » « less
  2. Over the past 200 years, the population of the United States grew more than 40-fold. The resulting development of the built environment has had a profound impact on the regional economic, demographic, and environmental structure of North America. Unfortunately, constraints on data availability limit opportunities to study long-term development patterns and how population growth relates to land-use change. Using hundreds of millions of property records, we undertake the finest-resolution analysis to date, in space and time, of urbanization patterns from 1810 to 2015. Temporally consistent metrics reveal distinct long-term urban development patterns characterizing processes such as settlement expansion and densification at fine granularity. Furthermore, we demonstrate that these settlement measures are robust proxies for population throughout the record and thus potential surrogates for estimating population changes at fine scales. These new insights and data vastly expand opportunities to study land use, population change, and urbanization over the past two centuries. 
    more » « less
  3. Abstract. Multi-temporal measurements quantifying the changes to the Earth's surface are critical for understanding many natural, anthropogenic, and social processes. Researchers typically use remotely sensed Earth observation data to quantify and characterize such changes in land use and land cover (LULC). However, such data sources are limited in their availability prior to the 1980s. While an observational window of 40 to 50 years is sufficient to study most recent LULC changes, processes such as urbanization, land development, and the evolution of urban and coupled nature–human systems often operate over longer time periods covering several decades or even centuries. Thus, to quantify and better understand such processes, alternative historical–geospatial data sources are required that extend farther back in time. However, such data are rare, and processing is labor-intensive, often involving manual work. To overcome the resulting lack in quantitative knowledge of urban systems and the built environment prior to the 1980s, we leverage cadastral data with rich thematic property attribution, such as building usage and construction year. We scraped, harmonized, and processed over 12 000 000 building footprints including construction years to create a multi-faceted series of gridded surfaces, describing the evolution of human settlements in Spain from 1900 to 2020, at 100 m spatial and 5-year temporal resolution. These surfaces include measures of building density, built-up intensity, and built-up land use. We evaluated our data against a variety of data sources including remotely sensed human settlement data and land cover data, model-based historical land use depictions, and historical maps and historical aerial imagery and find high levels of agreement. This new data product, the Historical Settlement Data Compilation for Spain (HISDAC-ES), is publicly available (https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.22009643, Uhl et al., 2023a) and represents a rich source for quantitative, long-term analyses of the built environment and related processes over large spatial and temporal extents and at fine resolutions.

     
    more » « less
  4. This article explores a conjunctural approach to comparison as a means to capture the complexity of the processes shaping metropolitan land transformations in a city of the global South, comparing the co-implicated actions of developers and local residents across central and peri-urban Jabodetabek. A conjunctural approach shares with some other forms of comparison the ambition to build new theories and challenge existing knowledge. Rather than controlling for the characteristics of units of analysis as in conventional comparison, a conjunctural approach attends to the broader spatio-temporal conjuncture. It involves highlighting unexpected or overlooked starting points for comparison, attending to inter-place, inter-scalar and inter-temporal relationalities in order to identify shared general tendencies as well as particularities and to chart their mutual constitution. Grounding this comparison iteratively puts local knowledge and observations in conversation with already existing theories. Deploying these principles in a socio-spatial intra-metropolitan comparison, we show that economic speculation on land and property is complexly entangled with actors’ socio-cultural speculations, as they seek also to realise aspirations for distinct peri/urban futures. Economic speculation deepens already existing inequalities in wealth and power differentials between and among developers and kampung residents. The erasure of informal settlements and displacement of their residents is supplemented by the ability of other kampungs and select residents to take advantage of spillover opportunities from the formal developments built on former kampung land. Distinct central city and peri-urban landscapes are emerging, shaped by differences in the social ecology of land and local governance and planning regimes.

     
    more » « less
  5. Increasing population and rural to urban migration are accelerating urbanization globally, permanently transforming natural systems over large extents. Modelling landscape change over large regions, however, presents particular challenges due to local-scale variations in social and environmental factors that drive land change. We simulated urban development across the South Atlantic States (SAS), a region experiencing rapid population growth and urbanization, using FUTURES—an open source land change model that uses demand for development, local development suitability factors, and a stochastic patch growing algorithm for projecting alternative futures of urban form and landscape change. New advances to the FUTURES modelling framework allow for high resolution projections over large spatial extents by leveraging parallel computing. We simulated the adoption of different urban growth strategies that encourage settlement densification in the SAS as alternatives to the region’s increasing sprawl. Evaluation of projected patterns indicate a 15% increase in urban lands by 2050 given a status quo development scenario compared to a 14.8% increase for the Infill strategy. Status quo development resulted in a 3.72% loss of total forests, 2.97% loss of highly suitable agricultural land, and 3.69% loss of ecologically significant lands. An alternative Infill scenario resulted in similar losses of total forest (3.62%) and ecologically significant lands (3.63%) yet consumed less agricultural lands (1.23% loss). Moreover, infill development patterns differed qualitatively from the status quo and resulted in less fragmentation of the landscape. 
    more » « less