Patterns of Urban Land Use as Assessed by Satellite Imagery: An Application to Cairo, Egypt

Most demographic literature contrasts urban and rural places as though they were always uniquely distinct places. However, as the urban transition progresses, a considerable middle ground has been developing in human settlements. Urban places are socially and environmentally more complex and variable than ever before and rural places are more urbanlike than ever before. These transformations suggest that an urban gradient may be more useful for social science research than a dichotomy. In this paper we apply an ecological conceptual framework suggesting that an important component of urban places is the transformation of land into a built environment. The new patterns of land use implied by these land cover changes are routinely ignored in social science literature, but can potentially be incorporated into an analysis of urban areas by combining the classification of data from remotely sensed imagery with census data. We review the processes by which urban land use can be inferred from remotely sensed imagery and then apply the method to Cairo, Egypt by combining the land use measures with underlying population data drawn from census data. INTRODUCTION At the beginning of the nineteenth century, almost everyone in the world lived in rural places. Cities like London and Paris were islands of urbanness in a sea of rurality. Even at the beginning of the twentieth century the vast majority (nearly 90 percent) of people lived in rural