Monitoring Urbanization from Space - Global Mapping of Mega Cities and Settlement Patterns

Abstract

The world-wide monitoring of mega cities as well as urban and rural settlements is a key issue to analyze and understand the complex phenomenon of global urbanization. Hence, the German Aerospace Center (DLR) has started two initiatives in support of the GEO (Group on Earth Observations) task ‘SB-04 - Global Urban Observation and Information’: a systematic analysis of the spatio-temporal mega cities development and the Global Urban Footprint project. The mega cities monitoring aims at the quantitative measurement of the spatial growth of all global mega cities over the last 40 years while the Global Urban Footprint initiative addresses the generation of a new global human settlements layer with ~75m ground resolution using data of the German SAR mission TanDEM-X. This presentation provides an overview on both, the mega cities monitoring and the Global Urban Footprint program including a description of the basic methodologies and an illustration of first results.