Information about the location and extent of informal settlements is necessary to guide decision making and resource allocation for their upgrading. Very high resolution (VHR) satellite images can provide this useful information, however, different urban settlement types are hard to be automatically discriminated and extracted from VHR imagery, because of their abstract semantic class definitio...

Water utilities in Africa find it increasingly difficult to provide adequate services to the needy areas: their core business operations are often stagnant, compounded by a dramatic rise in periurban and poor settlements. To address these challenges, the Water and Sanitation Program Africa has designed a work program to disseminate the best practice in pro-poor service development and to help u...

Around the world, particularly in North America and Australia, urban sprawl combined with low density suburban development has caused serious accessibility and mobility problems, especially for those who do not own a motor vehicle or have access to public transportation services. Sustainable urban and transportation development is seen crucial in solving transportation disadvantage problems in ...

The conversion of natural habitat to urban settlements is a primary driver of biodiversity loss, and species' persistence is threatened by the extent, location, and spatial pattern of development. Urban growth models are widely used to anticipate future development and to inform conservation management, but the source of spatial input to these models may contribute to uncertainty in their predi...

The objectives of the study were to provide quantitative information on the material benefits generated from urban farming in order to assess the contribution of this activity to the food security and nutrition of participating households and to explore the meaning of urban agriculture in the livelihood of participants. The study was conducted in five informal settlements of Atteridgeville, Pre...

1. introduction today, sustainability of rural and urban settlements and their population in developing world is one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century. however, today due to development of urbanization, the rural areas have undergone many changes . these changes have been concurrent with the developing process of urbanization and unorganized expansion of cities on the one hand, and...

Historic urban areas are a significant part of each city not only due to having irreplaceable cultural and social resources, but also due to their attractive patterns of life. They have being threatened by strong development trends. This paper aims to investigate the impacts of redevelopment trends in the historic city of Shiraz, Iran. The paper begins by highlighting historical development in ...

A particular challenge for undertaking urbanization mapping of Beirut is the absence of a unified understanding of the city. Migration, informal settlements, a lack of urban planning, political corruption, as well as internal conflict have made this task even harder. The population in Lebanon is unevenly distributed among regions, where one third of the population resides in the Greater Beirut ...