Spatio-Temporal Growth of Benin City, Nigeria, and Its Implications for Access to Infrastructure

The study looks at population growth, spatial expansion and its implications on access to public infrastructure in Benin City. Remote Sensing and GPS were used to generate data for the study. Image processing was carried out with ENVI to assess the spatio-temporal growth of Benin City while ArcGIS was used for neighbourhood analysis of residents’ access to public facilities. The study reveals that there is a strong positive relationship between population and built-up area with correlation coefficient of 0.794 at p=0.05level. It further reveals that both the population and spatial growth of Benin City are faster than the pace of infrastructure provision and that the lag between the growth of Benin City and infrastructure provision is impacting negatively on the quality of lives of the residents and threatens the sustainability of urban environment. To bridge the infrastructure gap the study suggests that alternative sources of fund other than federal allocation be sought for, as the capacity of the urban government to finance infrastructure within the current available revenue is limited.