This paper considers the limits and potential of ‘urban metabolism’ to conceptualize city processes. Three ‘ecologies’ of urban metabolism have emerged. Each privileges a particular dimension of urban space, shaped by epistemology, politics, and model-making. Marxist ecologies theorize urban metabolism as hybridized socionatures that (re)produce uneven outcomes; industrial ecology, as stocks an...

the complexity of urban systems in our recent world, make it difficult to evaluation and explanation of their changes with traditional and customarily methods. in the past, remote sensing has shown an ability to detect and describe urban growth patterns at different spatial scales. with new remote sensing devices (e.g. ikonos), with innovative image processing techniques and with further develo...

Cities are centres of economy, policy, society and culture and more than half of the world’s population already lives in metropolitan areas. In the last decades the world has faced a constantly accelerating growth of urban areas a development which is closely related to a tremendous increase of the urban population. In 2007 the amount of urban residents has outnumbered the rural population for ...

Technologies have started to overlap new virtual communication and information layers on top of the urban physical territory, thus bringing along distinct possibilities of social organization. Regarding this phenomenon and intending to achieve improvement in a great variety of fields from Politics to Urban Planning, the terms of Smart or Digital Cities among others have been adopted, still with...

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) remote sensing has great potential for vegetation mapping in complex urban landscapes due to the ultra-high resolution imagery acquired at low altitudes. Because of payload capacity restrictions, off-the-shelf digital cameras are widely used on medium and small sized UAVs. The limitation of low spectral resolution in digital cameras for vegetation mapping can be re...

Phase coherence between pairs of ERS SAR images is investigated as a method for mapping urban extent in South Wales, United Kingdom. Separability indices show that image pairs with time delays of greater than 2 months and baseline separations of less than 300 m can discriminate effectively between urban and non-urban land. Classification kappa coefficients greater than 90 percent are achieved, ...

given the critical role played by urban green spaces and the emergence of remote sensing as avaluable natural resource management tool, this study sought to identify trends in green spaces within thecontext of south africa’s transition period (1990 - 2000). using the city of port elizabeth as a case study, threesets of landsat - 5 thematic mapper images (1990, 1995 and 2000) were geo-processed,...

This paper reviews how remotely sensed data have been used to understand the impact of urbanization on global environmental change. We describe how these studies can support the policy and science communities’ increasing need for detailed and up-to-date information on the multiple dimensions of cities, including their social, biological, physical, and infrastructural characteristics. Because th...