| dc.description.abstract | Current urban growth planning initiatives for Nairobi city mainly rely on single-epoch static maps as base data in conjunction with other non-spatial attribute information. This approach falls short of offering an optimal interactive environment to planners that is helpful in making decisions about the best mix of land uses, and their temporal and spatial dimensions. With increasing availability of cartographic multimedia tools for handling spatial-temporal data, urban growth phenomena can be analysed through cartographic visualization.
Cartographic animation has emerged as a potentially effective visualization technique that has an intuitive power in representing dynamic geographical phenomena through its ability to show interrelations amongst geospatial data components, location, attribute and time. Whereas cartographic animations have featured prominently in communicating geospatial information, their use as visual exploration tools is hampered by lack of necessary functionality that is capable of allowing users to interact with the dynamic display. This report gives the findings of a research study for visualizing Nairobi's urban growth, from 1995 to 2002, through cartographic animation. Showing a series of images in sequence generated an animation of land use change for an area of approximately 1600 sq. km.
The animation was created on the basis of the number of original data frames available, the optimal animation display speed, the number of intermediate frames to create between the known frames and the media on which the animation was to be displayed. Urban growth spatial themes identified for the study were built-up, un built and vegetated areas. Creating the animation involved generating raster images for the temporal and spatial land use themes, converting them to bitmap thematic frames and subsequently importing the frames to a movie file.
The results of this study are useful for visual thinking and communication of information on temporal and spatial-components for the land use categories. The results from this animation can be improved by analyzing them in conjunction with other non-spatial urban growth data for Nairobi.
Key Words: Urban Growth, Visualization, Animation | en_US |
