Long-term investigation of urban sprawl on the basis of remote sensing data – Results of an international city comparison

ABSTRACT: The land use and its structure are basis indicators for the socio-economic and ecological efficiency of cities. In most cases, these data sets are mono-temporal and thus not suitable for land use monitoring. On the basis of different satellite data and aerial photographs the land use data of eight selected European cities was mapped at four time slots during a period of the last 50 years in the EU project MOLAND to a scale of 1:25,000. An extended CORINE Land Cover legend (CLC-Key plus a fourth level) was used for the classification. By means of that data decided GIS analyses were carried out for the cities of Bilbao, Bratislava, Dresden, Copenhagen, Lyon, Munich, Porto and Palermo in order to answer questions on the sustainability of the urban development. The most important results will be shown in this paper.