Pace and forms of the Global South’s urban sprawl: a case study for Tangier and its suburbs (Northern Morocco)
摘要
Urban sprawl has become a defining feature of the rapid structural transformations reshaping cities in the Global South, placing increasing strain on urban planning systems amid industrial restructuring and uneven development. In this context, Tangier represents a strategic Mediterranean case in which accelerated demographic growth and large-scale industrial investment have reshaped suburban areas and intensified peri-urban land conversion. Despite these dynamics, few long-term studies connect spatial expansion to the functional restructuring of the metropolitan landscape. This study analyses urban expansion in Tangier and its suburbs between 1965 and 2024, identifies its demographic and economic drivers, and examines its implications for suburban transformation. It uses a novel quantitative-spatial methodology that combines deep-learning-based building detection within a geographic information systems framework to achieve homogeneous reconstruction of the urban footprint across time. The results show that the built-up area increased from 5.10 km2 (1965) to 22.13 km2 (2024), and the population rose from 164,000 (1960) to 1,268,512 in 2024. Peripheral communes recorded annual expansion rates of 6–8%, confirming a transition from a compact morphology toward a dispersed, increasingly polycentric metropolitan structure. Agricultural land has been converted into urban–industrial landscapes anchored in logistics and manufacturing investment. The findings demonstrate that industrial-led suburbanisation has transformed metropolitan hierarchies and outpaced planning capacities, consolidating spatial fragmentation and sociospatial inequalities. This research reframes Global South secondary cities in relation to theories of urban sprawl and develops existing approaches to metropolitan restructuring.