Developing an urban sustainability toolbox using earth observation data and GIS for monitoring rapid urbanisation in developing countries

Urban planners require data to monitor sustainable urban development. Accordingly this study is a synthesis of a studies by Musakwa (2013) and Musakwa and Van Niekerk (2013) who evaluated the potential of earth observation (EO) for monitoring and modeling sustainable land use in urban centers using Stellenbosch, South Africa as a case study. The unavailability, unreliability, outdatedness and unstandardised nature of urban land use planning data in developing countries was the motivation for the investigation. Many local authorities are inadequately equipped to plan for sustainable development in hyperchanging environments. Because sustainable land use, like sustainable development, are elusive concepts to put into practice in routine decision-making, an emerging structured framework, decision consequence analysis (DCA) was proposed to aid decision making for sustainable urban land use planning. DCA breaks complex problems, such as sustainable urban development, into increasingly smaller units until the particular component can be accurately analysed and understood within the context of the overall problem. Therefore, sustainable urban land use was divided into three themes, namely land use change and land use mix, urban sprawl and the urban built-up area