Delimiting the Central Business District – A physical analysis using Remote Sensing

Abstract

Central Business Districts (CBDs) are important for the functional arrangement of cities and urban risk analysis, however, past research underscores the importance of their spatial delineation. This dissertation presents a conceptual framework to define this urban structure type using physical parameters, and a transferable method to detect and delineate CBDs from a combination of Cartosat-1 high resolution digital surface models and multispectral Landsat images. Applying the method to three European megacities, CBDs are detected with a producer accuracy of 75.71% and spatially delineated with overall accuracies exceeding 82.97%. Cross-city comparison paints a characteristic picture of the spatial CBD configuration.