ABSTRACT
The European Science Foundation meeting on which the chapters of this book are ba ed took place at an interesting and exciting period in the development of urban remote sensing. In some sen es, the meeting came too early in that it predated both the launch of the 'new generation ' of very high spatial resolution (optica l) satellite sensors, and the wide dissemination of a variety of digital data sources that can now be used to augment detailed satellite data . Some of the techniques presented at the meeting were proprietary, and their natures were neither immediately transparent nor yet open to scrutiny through the peer-reviewed academic literature. Opaqueness of exposition survives in some of the contributions to this book, although we have tried to make the message, if not the detail, of the contributions as clear as possible. In these respects - paucity of 'good' data and a 'grey' literature of developing technique-the formative days of urban remote sensing (RS) seem curiou ly akin to the early development of GIS . Today the field is developing rapidly (Donnay et al., Chapter 1 this volume) and is converging with mainstream GIS applications (Atkinson and Tate 1999). As such, there are now very real prospects that 'RS-GIS' can provide a near seamless software environment for urban analysis.
