Urban dynamics in the greater Phoenix area

Abstract

Growing urbanization has become a major concern in the combat of climate change. In order to tackle the problems occurring from unsustainable expansion of cities, it is necessary to first quantify the changes in built-up areas. This thesis presents a way of detecting newly built urban areas on the example of Phoenix, Arizona. The Phoenix Metropolitan Area has been the fastest growing region of the United States in the last years. Based on an expert knowledge decision tree, the implemented methodology in this thesis relies only on publicly available data and tools in order to allow anyone to use, recreate and built upon it. The Google Earth Engine platform was used to make two separate classifications of urban change using Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 data. The combination of these independent classifications proved to be a good lower bound for the detection of newly built urban areas.