Demographic data and remote sensing to monitor urban growth: the Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam) case study

In the last decades Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), Vietnam, has experienced a rapid urbanization. This town grows from 2.3 millions of inhabitants in the 1975 until 8 millions in the 2014. Therefore, understanding the land-cover changes is one of the main topics in order to monitor the process of urban development. In this paper we study the urban dynamics of HCMC using two Landsat scenes acquired on June of 1988 (sensor TM) and on February 2017 (sensor OLI/TIRS). We relate our main results with other sources, like demographic data and the participative maps of OpenStreetMap. So, we identify main land cover changes in this period, such as the most important demographic variations within the urban districts of HCMC