Using cloud computing techniques to map the geographic extent of informal settlements in the greater Cape Town Metropolitan Area

Although remote sensing approaches offer unprecedented opportunities to understand urban land cover dynamics including informal settlements areal extent, challenges such as spectral confusions still persist, particularly when segregating land cover types like informal settlements from planned formal settlements. The improvements in Earth Observation (EO) data analytic tools such as introduction of Google Earth Engine (GEE) cloud computing platform, provide prospects to improve separability of these settlements from other urban land cover classes, via their advanced data processing and filtering algorithm, which allows for the synergic use of multisource and multi-temporal data, thus improving detection and monitoring of these settlements. This study harnessed the advance data analytic powers of GEE cloud computing platform coupled with higher resolution Sentinel-2 data to map the geographical extent of informal settlement in the Cape Town Metropolitan Area. The classification yielded six land cover classes: formal settlements, informal settlements, water, bare or built-up areas, vegetated lands, and croplands. Built-up formal settlement was the most dominant class, accounting for 70% of the total Cape Town surface area, while open water was the least dominant, accounting for 2%. Informal settlements accounted for approximately 7% of all settlements. Although overall accuracy was within acceptable limits (68%), some classes, such as vegetated lands and formal settlements, reported low class accuracies due to spectral similarities with other classes. The findings highlight the importance of the GEE platform, as well as the interaction of contextual and spectral characteristics, as well as various sentinel-2 derived water, built up, and vegetation indices in mapping informal settlements. These findings are critical for the facilitation of improved urban planning, provision of services and assisting in alleviating social as well as environmental issues within the Cape Town Metropolitan area.