ABSTRACT
CONTENTS 2.1 Introduction ................................................................................................. 19
2.1.1 Difficulties of Remotely Sensing Urban Land Use ................... 20 2.1.2 Aggregated Urban Spatial Patterns ............................................. 21 2.1.3 Disaggregated Urban Spatial Patterns ........................................ 22
2.2 Point-Based Geographies........................................................................... 23 2.2.1 Point-Based Geographies of Bristol and Belfast ........................ 25
2.3 Nearest Neighbor Indices of Point Distributions .................................. 26 2.3.1 Belfast and Bristol Nearest Neighbor Indices ............................ 27 2.3.2 Linear Nearest Neighbor Indices of Point Distributions ......... 33
2.4 Using Postal Point Data to Infer Land Use from IKONOS Imagery.............................................................................. 34
2.5 Conclusions and Further Research .......................................................... 39 Acknowledgments ............................................................................................... 40 References ............................................................................................................. 40
The recent revitalized interest in satellite urban remote sensing is as much the result of strengthening links with GIS as it is of the breakthrough in super-high spatial resolution satellite sensor data (Mesev, 2003a). For the first time, the rationale for using satellite sensor data in urban planning can go beyond coarse approximations of land-use characterization and become more sympathetic to the needs for up-to-date precision maps of land-use delineation, which in turn are critical for government policy decisions on individual household behavior and interaction (Donnay, 1999). As such,
there is now also a realistic possibility that urban remote sensing can begin to emulate environmental remote sensing and play an increasingly central role for supporting national and regional policies on the estimation of population change (Chen, 2002), the calculation of quality-of-life indices (Lo, 2003), and the evaluation of transport flow, as well as the precise delineation of urban features and measurement of size, density, and height of buildings (Barnsley et al., 2003).
