Potential applications

Monitoring change

Urban development is one of the key issues facing land-use planning departments today. Monitoring the spread of urbanization concerns regions, groups of urban communities or even entire countries, and may sometimes span international borders. Regional and local development programmes need geographic information to give decision-makers a broad picture that reaches across all sectors. Such programmes have to ensure that land-use provisions are spatially coherent and take environmental issues fully into account.
Collecting uniform and current geographic data for planning purposes is not always an easy task. Tools for tracking built-up areas, especially in peri-urban zones, require map coverage of vast areas that is both accurate-to locate buildings-and uniform.

Land-use planning departments rely on geographic data updated on a yearly basis covering urban conurbations at a scale of 1:10 000. SPOT 5's improved resolution and wide-area coverage lets urban planners:

• Produce land-use maps with CORINE land cover classes
• Go from level 3 to level 4 or 5 by using 10-metre or 5-metre colour imagery
• Identify land-use patterns in specific urban zones, industrial and trading estates, and residential areas

Shape and distribution criteria can be applied to built-up areas and vegetation to classify urban areas as:
- urban historic centre
- urban extra-muros
- urban
- detached housing
- apartments
- specific urban areas

 

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To promote sustainable urban development and enhance quality of life, urban planning departments are focusing their attention on vegetation in urban and peri-urban zones-parks and green spaces, hedgerows and wooded areas bordering lakes, rivers and canals-in order to zone and protect greenbelt areas.
SPOT 5's improved resolution and spectral sensing capability make it possible to:

• Locate public and private green spaces
• Populate census parcel maps in urban databases (at 1:10 000)

SPOT 5 2.5-metre colour imagery enables automatic calculation of indicators showing the area covered by vegetation inside each census parcel of the urban database (at a scale of 1:10 000).

 

 

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Cities grow by spreading outwards or through a process of densification. Spatial distribution of housing and unoccupied land is the kind of information SPOT 5 imagery can highlight for urban land-use planning.

• SPOT 5 imagery is ideal for characterizing urban growth

 

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The advantages of SPOT 5 for urban mapping at 1:10 000 HRG instrument (High Resolution Geometric) Multi-resolution, wide-swath imaging - Finer ground resolution in black-and-white mode: 2.5 metres and 5 metres (instead of 10 metres). - Finer resolution in colour mode: 10 metres (instead of 20 metres) for studying vegetation. - Like all their predecessors, each SPOT 5 instrument covers a 60-kilometre swath, making it possible to image large conurbations in a single pass.

 

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References

• SPOT 5 Preparatory Programme - Evaluation of the benefits of SPOT 5 data for mapping urban land use - CERTU.
• SPOT 5 Preparatory Programme - Benefits of very-high-resolution SPOT 5 data for managing urban databases - Scot.

 

Potential applications SPOT 5 imagery offers an easily accessible source of information covering an area the size of an urban conurbation, acquired in a single scene, at scales suited to land-use planning (1:10 000 and 1:25 000). SPOT 5 data can be used to produce urban land-use maps, especially for studying urban/rural fringes, to confirm and spatially reference statistical data about boroughs, and to keep track of evolving land use.

 

AVANTAGES Les atouts de Spot 5 pour la cartographie urbaine au 1/10 000 L'instrument HRG (Haute Résolution Géométrique) Multi résolution et large fauchée - Résolution plus fine en mode noir et blanc : 2,5 m et 5 m (au lieu de 10 m). - Résolution plus fine en mode couleur : 10 m (au lieu de 20 m). - Largeur de champ de chaque instrument : 60 km, comme sur Spot 1 à 4, permettant de couvrir en une seule fois les grandes agglomérations.