Most of the studies related to urban environments in developing countries focus mainly on particular aspects e.g.communication, residential, vegetated areas, etc. However, planners who are concerned about urban space management are also interested in the distribution and the change extent of the three main spatial domains namely developed, transition and reserved areas. This information facilitates subsequent land use negotiation processes. In this paper, standard classification procedures have been employed to extract this information from remotely sensed imagery such as the ones delivered by the new high resolution satellites, specifically from colour aerial photographs from 1995 and 1998 resampled to a ground resolution of 5m and Landsat TM from 1995. Postclassification analysis revealed comparable results for the 1995 datasets, whereas land use changes were evaluated by comparing the 1995 and 1998 classified images. © 2000 International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. All rights reserved.