Looking Forward: Remote Sensing as Dataware for Human Settlement Simulation

As a field, urban simulation has had an interesting history in recent decades. There was a span of time in the late-1960s and the 1970s when there was a comparative surge in the use of simulation in planning and policy-making. That period was followed by a long ‘winter’, in which planners and policy-makers turned away from urban simulation as a planning support tool. Nevertheless, there has been a recent rejuvenated interest in simulating human settlements, catalyzed in large part by developments in the field. In particular, an abundance of high-quality geographic information resources has facilitated the development of models of human settlements with hitherto unfathomed flexibility, functionality, and resolution. Remote sensing has been at the forefront of this ‘dataware revolution’. Yet, research in this area is in early stages, and much of its potential remains to be realized.