The city grew faster than anyone recorded it
Mogadishu and Somalia’s other urban centres have expanded enormously in two decades, largely without a cadastre keeping pace. Planning decisions, service delivery and land disputes all rest on a picture of the city that is years out of date — and the current picture has been photographed from orbit every few days the whole time.
Four questions a city cannot answer from its files
Where has the city actually reached?
Built-up extent mapped from current imagery, rather than from a boundary drawn before most of the expansion happened.
- Used for
- Service planning, boundary and district decisions
What appeared, and when?
Change detection across an archive going back years, showing which areas were built in which period and how quickly.
- Used for
- Land administration, disputes, planning enforcement
How many structures, and how dense?
Building footprint counts and density by area — the basis for any realistic estimate of population, demand or exposure.
- Used for
- Utilities, waste, health and education planning
What is built where it should not be?
Development on flood plains, in corridors or on land reserved for something else — identified while it is still a planning problem rather than a disaster one.
- Used for
- Risk reduction, enforcement, infrastructure protection
Built to sit inside your systems
Land and planning data is only useful if the department can open it, keep it and defend it. That shapes the delivery more than the analysis does.
Formats
- Vector & raster
- Standard GIS formats that open in the tools a planning department already uses
- Documentation
- Method, source imagery and date recorded with every layer
Provenance
- Traceable
- Every measurement tied to a dated image, so a finding can be defended rather than asserted
- Repeatable
- The same method re-run later gives a comparable result
Residency
- Held here
- Hosted in our Mogadishu data centre rather than on a foreign platform
- Why it matters
- Land records are among the most sensitive data a state holds
Updating
- On a cycle
- Quarterly or annual re-observation, so the layer stays current instead of ageing
- On demand
- A targeted look at one area when a decision needs it
Tell us the city and the decision it is blocking
Whether it is a service plan, a boundary, a dispute or an enforcement question, we will tell you what can be measured, how far back the archive goes, and how defensible the result would be.