Beira is Mozambique's second city (map 1). Established in 1884 as a Portuguese military base with a port and railway line it was designed to provide connectivity to the interior as well as to handle trade traffic from Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The city has undergone rapid growth and transformation since the country achieved independence in 1975. From a mere 215,000 inhabitants in 1980, it registered 409,260 in 1997. However, such phenomenal growth has not been without consequences: unemployment, informal settlements, poor service delivery, and environmental decay are common features.

Two challenges lie at the core of Beira's current problems: one is its physical location and the other is its colonial legacy. Built at the confluence of Pungwe and Buzi rivers, the city lies in a swampy floodplain with poor natural drainage. Developable land, therefore, is at premium.

To ensure the functionality of the city colonial authorities constructed a network system of underground and open canals to facilitate drainage. The system worked as long as development controls were in place and there was no pressure to accommodate the African population as part of the urban built environment. Unfortunately post-independence Mozambican cities like their counterparts elsewhere in developing countries suffer from the absence of any systematic, enforced planning.

Without maintenance and development controls the system of controlled drainage has fallen into disrepair and rendered inoperable by the increased squatter formation in low laying areas that are prone to flooding. Equally alarming is the fact that ecologically vulnerable areas account for over 80% of all

The other evil is, of course, the city's legacy of spatial segregation: sound infrastructure and good housing for European enclaves and very little for Africans. In 1975, however the city experienced a dramatic transformation when a massive influx of Africans moved in to reclaim a city hastily abandoned by the departing Portuguese. As densities increased the city found itself ill-prepared and unable to cope with the basic needs of the new population due to lack of both institutional capacity and resources. The existing housing stock and infrastructure simply deteriorated or fell into disrepair. As a result, access to safe drinking water and sanitary sewers in the previously built up city has become a major health issue.

Currently only 43% of the city's residents have access to piped water and of this number only 60% have access to water that meets the World Health Organization minimum standards for safe drinking. Nationally, access to safe water is enjoyed by only 50% of the population while access to sanitation is estimated at 39%. The increased pollution of water supplies associated with a deficient sewerage system or insufficient drainage and overbuilding in flood prone areas where residents use latrines has made both formal and informal residents vulnerable to water-borne diseases. In 1997, for example 11,000 people were treated for diarrhea, while an equally significant number were exposed to cholera resulting in 600 fatalities.

Compounding these challenges that the City of Beira would have been expected to address under normal circumstances has been the impact of the civil war that devastated the country for two decades. During and after the civil war, heavy migration from the rural provinces into Beira resulted in a 95% increase in the city's metropolitan population including Dondo.

The current urban population growth rate of 6.4% per annum is one of the highest in Sub-Sahara Africa. A significant proportion of the rural migrants found safe heaven in squatter settlements within and on the urban fringe. As a result, more than 50% of the city's current urban households are squatters without access to basic infrastructure such as portable water, sanitation and waste management and sustainable economic opportunities.

In 1983, the City of Beira attempted to address these challenges by commissioning the Beira Structure Plan. The plan presented ambitious proposals to improve and expand existing urban infrastructure, improve economic opportunity while tackling the serious problem of squatter formation in the ecologically sensitive and poor infrastructures areas of the city. The plan proposals were never adopted or implemented due to the impact of the civil war and insufficient human and financial resources.

As relative peace and stability has returned to the country, the city of Beira finds itself faced with multiple problems including the need to: expand employment opportunities for a rapidly growing population and, address challenges of insufficient drainage and sewerage systems, water shortages, power outages, deficient road infrastructure, inadequate shelter, and other failures in city management. Underlying these challenges, however, is the need to developreliable and useable spatial databases for urban maintenance, management and planning.

There is general agreement that accurate, timely and policy relevant data are a prerequisite for effective planning, management and governance. However, the ability of cities to design and articulate their data needs, obtain relevant data and use it for policy design and monitoring is often inadequate. This scenario is typical of Beira; where both qualitative and quantitative data remain a major constrain to apply to the most pressing problems.

To address this challenge, this project developed a baseline GIS database that uses the infrastructure indicator as a driver to monitor and analyze urban change. The choice of this indicator as a driver is premised on the simple recognition of the close correlation between infrastructure capacity and sustainable urban growth. Besides being essential for urban economic and employment growth both formal and informal cess to water and sanitation the provision of infrastructure is a key determinant for housing provision and a good predictor of housing quality.