A global fingerprint of macro-scale changes in urban structure from 1999 to 2009

By Steve Frolking, Tom Milliman, Karen C. Seto, Mark A. Friedl. 2013

152 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Urban population now exceeds rural population globally, and 60–80% of global energy consumption by households, businesses, transportation, and industry occurs in urban areas. There is growing evidence that built-up infrastructure contributes to carbon emissions inertia, and that investments in infrastructure today have delayed climate cost in the future. Although the United Nations statistics include data on urban population by country and select urban agglomerations, there are no empirical data on built-up infrastructure for a large sample of cities. Here we present the first study to examine changes in the structure of the world’s largest cities from 1999 to 2009. Combining data from two space-borne sensors—backscatter power (PR) from NASA’s SeaWinds microwave scatterometer, and nighttime lights (NL) from NOAA’s defense meteorological satellite program/operational linescan system (DMSP/OLS)—we report large increases in built-up infrastructure stock worldwide and show that cities are expanding both outward and upward. Our results reveal previously undocumented recent and rapid changes in urban areas worldwide that reflect pronounced shifts in the form and structure of cities. Increases in built-up infrastructure are highest in East Asian cities, with Chinese cities rapidly expanding their material infrastructure stock in both height and extent. In contrast, Indian cities are primarily building out and not increasing in verticality. This new dataset will help characterize the structure and form of cities, and ultimately improve our understanding of how cities affect regional-to-global energy use and greenhouse gas emissions.

Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9f5338d27b081dc6183b36826e80ccc11519f229

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Citations in the corpus

Building up or spreading out? Typologies of urban growth across 478 cities of 1 million+ (2019, methodology): “In Frolking et al (2013), two remotely sensed datasets, the backscatter from QuikSCAT SeaWinds scatterometer and nighttime light data from NOAA’s Defense Meteorological Satellite Program/Operational Linescan System (DMSP/OLS) were used to characterize 2- and 3D urban growth.”
Ecology in an anthropogenic biosphere (2015, background): “2014), including massive vertically built structures (Frolking et al. 2013), and artificial structures interconnected across continents (e.”
Using Nighttime Satellite Imagery as a Proxy Measure of Human Well-Being (2013, background): “A recent study juxtaposing nighttime satellite imagery with radar imagery demonstrated dramatic differences between the evolution of urban structure in cities in India and China [59].”
A new urban landscape in East–Southeast Asia, 2000–2010 (2015, unknown): “New datasets (crowd sourcing, social media, etc) and advances in radar/lidar have the potential to signi ﬁ cantly change how we monitor urban change (Frolking et al 2013, Tsou et al 2013).”