Issues regarding environmental degradation and calls for sustainability in the urban space emerged quickly after the call for “Our Common Future” in 1988. The concentration of large numbers of people on a limited land area quickly causes numerous issues that manifested first as “sick” urban dwellers, “dirty” cityscapes, “crowded” neighborhoods, “overburdened” urban infrastructure, and then eventually as “rapidly degraded” urban environments. This is not surprising, though, as urban space is the place where the most intensive interactions between humans and nature occur. Many current urban studies, therefore, aim to understand the fundamental mechanisms of the human–nature interaction, the means and tools to reach sustainability, and the practices and policies that can guarantee long-term prosperity. This might signify a research paradigm shift from an early focus on the cities themselves, transitioning from understanding and describing the varied urban patterns, the vibrant urban landscapes, the burgeoning urban development, and the dynamic urban socioeconomic complex, to more research on the complex and intensive human–nature interaction of the urban space. From Figure 1, the many research topics in urban studies seem to be in the fields of environmental sciences and studies. This broad search result suggests a fundamental core topic and current research foci in the field of urban studies. The review attempts to serve as a bridge between the growing “big data” and modern urban study communities. This current study reviews the development, current status, and future trajectory of urban studies facilitated by the advancement of remote sensing and spatial big data analytical technologies. For the first time, urban scholars can model, simulate, and predict changes in the urban landscape using real-time data to produce the most realistic results, providing invaluable information for urban planners and governments to aim for a sustainable and healthy urban future. Urban scholars are now equipped with abundant data to examine many theoretical arguments that often result from limited and indirect observations and less-than-ideal controlled experiments. The combination of these two types of data sources results in explosive and mind-blowing discoveries in contemporary urban studies, especially for the purposes of sustainable urban planning and development. In the meantime, the rapid development of telecommunications and mobile technology, alongside the emergence of online search engines and social media platforms with geotagging technology, has fundamentally changed how human activities and the urban landscape are recorded and depicted. During the past decades, multiple remote sensing data sources, including nighttime light images, high spatial resolution multispectral satellite images, unmanned drone images, and hyperspectral images, among many others, have provided fresh opportunities to examine the dynamics of urban landscapes.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |