The Implication of Urban Morphological Changes to Sustainable Urban Development of Eldoret Municipality, Kenya

Abstract

Whereas 70% of world’s population is projected to live in urban areas by the year 2050, 80% of the current urban population reside in informal settlements. Urbanization presents significant spatial transformations in respect to land use and land cover changes that calls for assessment of the inhomogeneity of the urban morphology. This research comprehensively analyzes the morphological dynamics at 10-year interval from 1989 a year after Eldoret town acquired municipality status up to 2023 in land use land cover dimensions, quantifying built-up area growth at every epoch. Incoherent, uncontrolled and uncoordinated horizontal development is phenomenon evident within Eldoret municipality which sets a bad precedence for other municipalities that may be elevated to city status while still bearing the burdens of unplanned municipalities. The research methodology utilized Landsat imagery analysis and Geographic Information science techniques in carrying out Land use land cover analysis. Supervised classification's maximum likelihood algorithm was applied in classifying the satellite imagery into three classes: vegetation, built-up, and bare land. Change detection through image differencing was used to assess land use land cover dynamism as well as built-up area expansion and spread. This research leverages on the effective experts and public engagement in identifying driving forces behind inhomogeneous urban form. Analytical hierarchical process provided for ranking of driving factors through determination of their criteria weights. The most significant spatial drivers identified were; the Distance to CBD 26.73%, Distance to built-up area 22.77%, Distance to Roads 17.82%, Land use zone plan 10.89%. The built-up area grew from 6.23Km2 in 1989 to 20.13Km2 in 2023 with highest growth between 2019-2023 and 2009-2019 respectively. Eldoret municipality will continue urbanizing organically if driving forces for inhomogeneity are not planned for. This will also negatively impact on urban resilience and sustainable development of the municipality. GIS-based spatio-temporal analysis strongly proves efficient for adoption by urban planners and policy makers in planning for sustainability and resilience. This research proposes short, medium and long-term institutional, legal and community interventions as recommendations towards sustainable development and suitable and futuristic urban morphology of Eldoret municipality