Comparing the spatial structure of cities in East Africa, Europe and North America

Understanding urban spatial structure is important as it reflects, among other things, the liveability, sustainability, and economic situation of a city. While considerable research has been done on urban spatial structure in North America, Europe, and China, cities in sub-Sharan Africa are chronically understudied. Yet, the largest urban population growth of our time is taking place in exactly these cities, and as a consequence these cities face large sustainability challenges. In this paper, we develop new land use maps for multiple cities in East Africa, and use these to compare the spatial structure of cities in this region with cities in Europe and North America. By using land use, building footprint, and population data, we calculate several metrics in order to quantify the differences between cities of across three continents. We find that cities in East Africa, on average, have smaller building footprints compared to cities in North America and Europe, but that regarding land use clustering, built-up density and population distribution the variations within regions are higher than between them. Overall, the results indicate that the spatial structure of East African cities is not consistently different from cities in other continents, yet the variability found between cities of the same region challenge the idea that there is such a thing as a generic model for urban spatial structure. • Metrics of urban structure of East African cities were either comparable to European cities or cities from North America. • On average, building footprints in East African cities are smaller than in Europe and North America. • High variability between cities of the same region highlight the particularities of individual cities.