Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Cities journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/cities On the absurdity of rapid urbanization: Spatio-temporal analysis of land-use changes in Morogoro, Tanzania Neema Simon Sumari a, ⁎ , Patrick Brandful Cobbinah b , Fanan Ujoh c , Gang Xu d a Department of Mathematics, Informatics and Computational Sciences, Solomon Mahlangu College of Science and Education, Sokoine University of Agriculture, P.O. Box 3038, Morogoro, Tanzania b Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, Melbourne, VIC 3010, Australia c Centre for Sustainability and Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (SaRIC), London South Bank University, United Kingdom d School of Remote Sensing and Information Engineering, Wuhan University, 129 Luoyu Road, Wuhan 430079, China ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Land-use Land cover Urban expansion Spatio-temporal pattern Morogoro ABSTRACT This study questions the frequent overemphasis on population growth aspects of African urbanization with little consideration of the spatial extent by analyzing the influence of population growth on the spatial expansion of the Morogoro urban municipality (MUM) in Tanzania between 2000 and 2016. Shannon's Entropy, a random forest supervised classifier, and spatial analysis were adopted to analyze Multi-temporal Landsat images ob- tained through the Google Earth Engine platform to quantify the spatial and temporal distribution and pattern of land-use change. Findings from this research show that Shannon's entropy values for MUM increased from 0.522 in 2000, to 0.761 in 2007, and to 0.901 in 2016 with the urban land cover recording a considerable and con- sistent increase. Similarly, the municipality's annual rate of change in population decreased from 4.17% in 1967 to 3.81% in 2016, and is estimated to rise to 4.54% by 2030 with a corresponding population of 25,262 in 1967 and 622,000 in 2016. From the results, the rate of population growth is not commensurate with the rate of spatial expansion, as the spatial extent is more than twice the population growth. An important contribution from this research relates to the limited attention to the faster rate of urban expansion compared to population growth in African cities; a situation that is inconsistent with sustainable and resilient urban futures. It is re- commended that municipal authorities should consider initiatives (e.g., environmental planning models) to reverse the current trend of urban growth in order to improve the health, density, sustainability and resilience of the urban environment. 1. Introduction Rapid urbanization is one of the most challenging problems and fastest compounding task confronting cities in Sub-Saharan Africa (Cobbinah et al., 2015). While it is commonly perceived that urbani- zation exists primarily in the context of increasing population con- centration in urban areas, this paper explores the spatial extent of the urbanization discourse, and argues that the extent of spatial expansion in urbanizing cities in many African countries are inconsequential with population growth. Recent research on African urbanization (Chai & Seto, 2019a, 2019b; Korah et al., 2019a; Korah et al., 2019b; Xu et al., 2019d) indicates that cities are already sprawling due to unplanned urban expansion characterized by, inter alia, rural-urban migration, natural population increase, and the presence of weak urban planning regimes. While in developed countries, urban growth has traditionally served as an engine for economic growth and industrialization, the situation in the developing countries in Africa is different as the process is poverty-driven, premature, and often described as abnormal (Cobbinah and Adams, 2018; Obeng-Odoom, 2010). Yet, it is estimated that by 2100, the largest metropolises on earth will include African cities such as Lagos (Nigeria), Kinshasa (DR Congo) and Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) (see Cobbinah, 2015). Within the foregoing context, it is not surprising that unplanned but rapid urban population growth remains one of the major development issues confronting the African continent (Chai & Seto, 2019a, 2019b; Cobbinah et al., 2019). Urban population growth is rapidly changing the geography of towns and cities in Africa and other developing countries, with an understanding that rapid urban population growth is driving urban expansion. However, in many African countries, the mechanisms for ensuring effective urban management are generally weak (Cobbinah, 2015; Xu, Dong et al., 2019), and land supply for natural environmental resources such as urban forest and urban https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2020.102876 Received 5 September 2019; Received in revised form 3 June 2020; Accepted 7 July 2020 ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: neydsumari@sua.ac.tz (N.S. Sumari), patrick.cobbinah@unimelb.edu.au (P.B. Cobbinah), xugang@whu.edu.cn (G. Xu). Cities 107 (2020) 102876 0264-2751/ © 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. T