Modelling and simulating ‘informal urbanization’: An integrated agent-based and cellular automata model of urban residential growth in Ghana

The global urban population is expected to grow by 2.5 billion over the next three decades, and 90% of this growth will occur in African Asian countries. Urban expansion these regions often characterised ‘informal urbanization’ whereby households self-build without planning permission contexts ambiguous, insecure or disputed property rights. Despite scale informal urbanization, it has received little attention from scholars working domains analytics city science. Towards addressing gap, we introduce TI-City, an model designed predict locations, legal status socio-economic future residential developments city. In a bottom-up approach, use agent-based cellular automata modelling techniques geospatial behaviour key development actors, including households, real estate developers government. We apply city-region Accra, Ghana, drawing on local data collection, household survey, parameterise model. Using multi-spatial-scale validation technique, compare TI-City’s ability simulate historically observed built-up patterns with SLEUTH, highly popular Results show that TI-City outperforms SLEUTH at each scale, suggesting could offer valuable decision support tool similar contexts.