ROAD-NETWORK MORPHOLOGY, ACTIVITY CLUSTERING, AND URBAN-PLANNING PRIORITIES IN KAFANCHAN METROPOLIS, NIGERIA
The access to resources, settlement growth, infrastructure efficiency and dispersal of urban opportunities can be affected by road-network structure. The morphology, hierarchy and activity-related pattern of Kafanchan Metropolis, Kaduna State, Nigeria road network was studied. A planning-related investigation differs significantly from related works on developing a road construction monitoring application and the limiting factors of GIS and remote sensing implementation. A descriptive geospatial case-study adopted overlay of satellite images, GPS readings, prior morphological and infrastructural maps and field-verification. Road features were spatially automated, processed, classified and displayed within a unified GIS framework. Direction, distance, area, hotspot and network-traversal analyses were applied to interpret the orientation, hierarchy, connectivity, flow direction and activity density of road features. The resulting network is mainly a radial-corridor based network. Two major routes traversed the central business district to inter-city neighborhoods while interlinking route segments of the same hierarchy. Around commercial and administrative nodes higher aggregation of roads and activity was observed with the rest of the periphery having lower alternatives. The pattern enables movement inward but may lead to traffic and service centralisation along few intertwined corridors and nodes. Implication of the results is that construction should be monitored by the number of extra links in the existing network, hierarchy, geodesicity, redundancy, multimodal alternatives and compatibility to present and anticipated land uses. It is recommended that a topologically accurate road geo-database is produced, strategic corridor alignment preserved, cross-links implemented between radial corridors, junctions and activity aggregations upgraded and accessibility and centrality measures routinely computed. As the stored thesis document presents no numerical but reproducible network indices, the implications are interpreted as qualitative visual proof and should be complemented with graph theory calculations before generalisability.
Keywords: Road-network Morphology; Urban Accessibility; Activity Clustering; GIS; Transport Planning.
