Modelling Urbanisation in Cities in the Global South: A Review of Progress and Framework for the Future

Over the past several decades, urbanisation has been a key feature of cities in the Global South, and many scholars have used urban expansion models as tools to not only study this phenomenon, but to also predict likely evolution of cities in the region. Yet, there is limited knowledge of how urbanisation in the Global South has been modelled. In this study, we examine how urbanisation has been modelled in cities in the Global South, highlighting progress made and identifying key emerging issues for future research. Based on a review of 149 articles, we find an increasing preference for hybrid models that combine simple modelling approaches with more complex deep learning approaches. However, the advantages of hybrid approaches over stand-alone models in terms of prediction power has not been strongly established in the literature. We also find that most of the applications do not directly account for the social processes that generate the urban expansion patterns we observe in the region. As a result, the validation of most models has been limited to the ‘where’ (locations) and ‘when’ (time) and not the ‘who’ (socio-economic characteristics of occupants of location at a given point in time). The application of the models is highly localised as most studies do not model more than one city. This review could serve as a foundation for improving how urbanisation is modelled in the Global South.