823 
Symposium on Remote Sensing for Resources Development and Environmental Management / Enschede / August 1986 
iller, D.J.Stanl 
83. Spatial 
nsed imagery a 
note Sensing. 
tion of urban 
dsat data using 
1st Coll. on 
jects in remote 
Sept 8-11. p. 
rooming urban 
ith the new 
e sensors. 
. 1:889-896. 
y of TM sensor 
surface mine 
Remotely Sensed 
rownshend, J.E. 
The use of TM 
.scrimination, 
the UK SATMaP 
t 4 Sci. 
Results, NASA. 
ribution of the 
West Midlands 
st.Brit.Cart. 
The Nigerian urban environment: Aerial photographic inventory 
and mapping of land use characteristics 
Isi A.Ikhuoria 
Department of Geography & Regional Planning, University of Benin, Benin City, Nigeria 
ABSTRACT: The Nigerian urban environment has experienced three great periods of development: pre-colonial, and 
colonial, and post-colonial. Each stage gave rise to a special type of urban land-use (or city) that reflects 
its experience. These developments which are the results of traditional and modern development mechanisms have 
remained largely uncontrolled, unmonitored and unmapped. Consequently, the management and mapping of urban land 
resources is, seemingly, not in tune with the needs of current and future generations on the one hand, while 
the haphazard developments have posed intractable problems for planning on the other. In this paper, a practi 
cal application of aerial photographic remote sensing in inventorying and mapping land-use characteristics in 
three Nigerian urban centres, Lagos, Benin City and Warri is made. The result wholly provides the necessary 
land-use information and maps for planning and indepth analysis. It shows more glaringly the unequal impact of 
our development efforts from pre-colonial period to date. Especially relevant is that the research illustrates 
the effectiveness of aerial photographic remote sensing in providing the data needed to meet urban land resou 
rces and management constraints in developing countries. 
.S.Shen 1984. A 
m to reduce the 
id increase the 
isses . Pattern 
8 4. Improved 
scale urban 
mulator data. 
-770. 
[. Derelict Land, 
32 . An initial 
data for the 
;ural, Forested 
rs . NASA Repor- j 
3. 50pp. 
ial analysis of 
classification 
d wetland and 
Lands at 4 
r J. ed) 1983. 
i Applications. 
5499 TM 85499. 
3: 129-132. 
land in South 
• July, 1966. 
ods for TM data 
oc.of Remotely 
L43 . 
Cartographic 
TM Image data. 
82. Integration 
sly sensed and 
c Information 
ecora Symp. 
1 INTRODUCTION 
Within the past half a century, most Nigerian urban 
environments have experienced three great periods of 
tremendous developments: pre-colonial, colonial and 
post-colonial. Each stage gave rise to a special type 
of urban land use which reflects the cities 1 experi 
ences. These developments manifested by intensive 
land use activities, population concentrations and 
environmental changes, which are due to both tradit 
ional and modern development mechanisms have largely 
remained uncontrolled, unmonitored and unmapped. Con 
sequently, they have posed intractable problems for 
urban environmental planning and management. 
For example, Sada (1980) pointed out the existence 
and the need to arrest and improve decarying Nigerian 
rural and urban environments and: Mabogunje (1986), 
noted that "it is clear that our cities are the pla 
ces where environmental stress... has achieved the 
greatest salience in recent times." 
The situation is compounded by the lack of up-to- 
date thematic maps, land use and population data for 
effective control. Perhaps, the cause is the inadequ 
acy of current traditional methods of urban survey 
(that is, field enumeration and questionnaires) which 
do not incorporate practical application of better 
procedures of determining urban growth, land use, po 
pulation concentration and urban environmental quality 
changes. Thus a development of better ways to merge 
information acquired by non-conventional methods, for 
example, airborne and satellite remote sensing with 
existing data need to be explored. 
Indeed, having been afflicted with such environmen 
tal stress as urban blight (Ikhuoria, 1986) , urban 
rejuvenation which process poses intractable problems 
for planning (Sada, 1975), rapid population concentr 
ation and high rate of migration (Sada, 1984) and, 
land use and environmental dereliction (Omuta, 1985) , 
Nigeria is now in a position to, and should, appreci 
ate the need for adopting all necessary measures to 
monitor and register through mapping these urban spa 
tial structures and environmental changes. Such meas 
ures must be accurate, reliable, timely, cost-effec 
tive and availaole as and when required. Remote sens 
ing, particularly aerial photography is, in the third 
world context, ideal for mapping urban environments. 
Thus the specific objective of this paper is to iden 
tify and map the land use characteristics in Lagos 
Island, Benin City, and Warri; (Fig. 1) as well as 
seek theoretical explanations of their internal 
patterns. 
2 CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK 
Firstly, in acquiring data for urban land use analy 
sis , the level of aggregation or resolution and des- 
crimination strongly influences the quality of the 
conclusions which may be drawn. These concepts, so 
familiar to users of land use and census statistic 
are equally important in photo interpretation. Thus 
the four dimensions of resolution which include space, 
categories, intensity and time which were hitherto 
acquired by conventional field records of situational, 
personal and socio-economic indicators of urban struc 
tures have their parallels in remote sensing. These 
are spatial, spectral, radiometric and temporal reso 
lutions (Lintz and Simonett, 1976). Also, the concept 
of discrimination embodies three levels of assessment 
in remote sensing: detection, identification and ana 
lysis. Contained within these notions of discrimina 
tion are the probabilities of correct detection, iden 
tification and analysis. These probabilities vary from 
area to area and application to application. Urban 
planners and geographers, as a general rule, require 
information at the first two levels of detection and 
identification (Lintz and Simonett, 1976). And, for 
urban land use application, the acceptable probabili 
ty of correct identification is 85% (Anderson et al, 
1976). 
Secondly, the explanation of the urban organization 
of any society is a function of the socio-economic 
activities of man (Sule, 1982) which consequently 
create some spatial patterns. A land mark in urban 
land use theory was Burges (1923) concentric zonal 
theory which says that urban land use is patterned in 
a number of concentric zones. A second theory (Hoyt, 
1939), asserted that urban growth occurs in sectors 
along major traffic arteries. Thirdly, (Ulman, 1945) 
developed the multiple nucli model in which a city is 
shaped from a number of focal points where land uses 
of a similar type are concentrated. 
In the African context, Akin Mabogunje (1968) pro 
vided the Twin-centre concept in which he asserted 
that Nigerian cities grow from an amalgamation of two 
different urban processes (the traditional centre and 
the colonial centre) each of which has its centre of 
intense activity.