Spatial information about human settlements is key information in times of continuous urban growth
and high rates of uncontrolled urbanisation in developing countries, but there is often little geographic
information on where the population growth occurs. Built-up area is a good proxy for population that
can be extracted from Earth observation data. At the example of the city of Harare in Zimbabwe, this
research shows how remote sensing technologies can be used to obtain refined information on hot spots
of built-up area change that allow a monitoring of population. This was achieved through an automated
mapping of built-up area changes between 2004 and 2010 from multi-temporal high resolution satellite
images. The designed workflow combines an automatic feature extraction method with an automatic,
grid based change analysis. Built-up area was extracted from Spot images with accuracies between 78%
and 84% and changes were computed as percentage change in a grid using an object-based hierarchical
method. The derived built-up area and its changes were compared to population figures from the last
two censuses at ward level. The comparison reveals a good match of the pattern of changes of both
parameters; however, more detailed information was derived from the Earth observation data.