Abstract:
The cities of the developing world face major problems in managing growth and their urban spatial structures. The experiences of cities in the developed world have lessons to teach their developing world counterparts on how they have been able to deploy geospatial technology to plan and managed themselves. Geospatial technology and the underlying spatial data infrastructures (SDI) appear to offer significant potential to assist in planning and managing urban settlements in developing countries. In examining the challenges in the design and implementing spatial data infrastructure for urban land use planning the first part of the paper reviews the urbanization trends and land use planning challenges. It then looks at the application of geospatial technology and the underlying SDI before concluding with an attempt at SDI development in Ghana and the challenges that cities in Ghana faces in the bid to design and implement SDI for urban land use planning.