The role of Earth Observation in sustainable urban planning and management: the GEOURBAN approach

Kurzfassung

The increasing availability of Earth Observation (EO) data and methods has provided new opportunities for a wide range of urban applications, such as mapping and monitoring of the urban environment, socio-economic estimations, characterization of urban climate, analysis of regional and global impacts, and urban security and emergency preparedness. However, a gap exists between the research-focused results offered by the urban EO community and the application of these data and products by urban planners and decision makers. The ERA.Net-RUS project GEOURBAN (ExploitinG Earth Observation in sUstainable uRBan plAnning & management) aims at bridging the gap between EO scientists and urban planners by demonstrating the ability of current and future EO systems to depict parameters of urban structure and urban environmental quality over large areas at detailed level. The urban planners’ perspective was taken into account in developing a Web-based Information System (WIS). The GEOURBAN WIS has the potential to support urban planning and management by providing a set of EO-based indicators easily transferable to any city and understood by non-experts, respectively. Three cities with different typologies and planning perspectives were selected as case studies, namely Tyumen (Russia), Tel-Aviv (Israel), and Basel (Switzerland). The adaptation of the system to upcoming missions will be also addressed, hence it is expected that a fully-operational tool can be developed in the future. GEOURBAN is a two years project that has started in 2012. The main achievements of the first year of the project are presented in this study.