**3. Data**

Two SPOT images dating respectively from March 31, 1995 and July 1, 2005 were used. They are recorded in panchromatic and multispectral modes. Their radiometric quality is variable. The 1995 images have a cloud cover of 7% in multispectral and 5% in panchromatic, while the 2005 images have 6% of cloud cover in multispectral mode and 10% in panchromatic mode. The presence of these clouds is evidence of the difficulty of obtaining cloud-free images for areas located in the sub-equatorial climate. To make the different images comparable, a radiometric correction was performed. Unfortunately, due to the low correlation between the red and the green bands, it did not yield good results and was abandoned.

Other data were collected, digitized and georeferenced, if necessary, to analyse urban growth of the city. This entailed using the old cards to map the growth of Kinshasa over the long-term, population data and the relief and major roads.

In addition, to map the dynamics of the habitat of the Atlas of Kinshasa (Flouriot, 1975), the map "District Urban Leopoldville 1/60 000" presents the urban area in 1920. Plan Leopoldville (map 1/15 500 published by the bookseller Congo Leopoldville) gives the limit of the city in 1954. The map "Plan of Commons of Kinshasa and its Environs" to 1/20 000 published in 1959 by the Geographic Institute of Zaire is the drawing of municipal boundaries of the urbanized area in 1959. The map "City of Kinshasa-health zones" (Card 1/20 000 published in 1969 and revised in 1997 from the bottom of the base map of Kinshasa), provisional edition, published by the Geographical Institute of Zaire has the delineation of municipal boundaries of the urbanized area in 1969. All these documents are completely overwhelmed by the current situation (Delbart et al., 2002; Fox et al., 1997) and require updating.

The population data used suffers from both a paucity of quality and reliability in a country where the offices of the civil state are characterized by operating failure and where the general census of the population is not regularly organized. With the exception of the 1984 population numbers from the 1984 census, the others are mere projections of the National Institute of Statistics.

Coverage maps scale 1 / 10 000 by the Geographical Institute of the Belgian Congo (IGCB) dating from 1958 covering the city of Kinshasa have been scanned. The contours at a contour interval of 5 metres were digitized by students from MA1 geography at the university, corrected and interpolated by Mathieu De Maeyer (IGEAT / ULB) by the spline technique to produce a digital terrain model and derive the slope.

Some roads (in the north of the city and the far east, after the airport) were digitized from the SPOT panchromatic band (of 10 April 2000) and a plan of the city of Kinshasa (1 / 10 000) of March 1970 created by the Geographical Institute of the Congo. The roads in the west and south were measured and corrected by DGPS Pathfinder software. The railway was also digitized from the map of the city of Kinshasa. The roads of the southern part were digitized using only the SPOT panchromatic band of the 10 April 2000.
