The role of Earth observation in an Integrated Deprived Area Mapping “System” for low-to-middle income countries

Kuffer, M. et al. (2020) The role of Earth observation in an Integrated Deprived Area Mapping “System” for low-to-middle income countries. Remote Sensing, 12(6), 982. (doi: 10.3390/rs12060982)

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Abstract

Urbanization in the global South has been accompanied by the proliferation of vast informal and marginalized urban areas that lack access to essential services and infrastructure. UN-Habitat estimates that close to a billion people currently live in these deprived and informal urban settlements, generally grouped under the term of urban slums. Two major knowledge gaps undermine the efforts to monitor progress towards the corresponding sustainable development goal (i.e., SDG 11—Sustainable Cities and Communities). First, the data available for cities worldwide is patchy and insufficient to differentiate between the diversity of urban areas with respect to their access to essential services and their specific infrastructure needs. Second, existing approaches used to map deprived areas (i.e., aggregated household data, Earth observation (EO), and community-driven data collection) are mostly siloed, and, individually, they often lack transferability and scalability and fail to include the opinions of different interest groups. In particular, EO-based-deprived area mapping approaches are mostly top-down, with very little attention given to ground information and interaction with urban communities and stakeholders. Existing top-down methods should be complemented with bottom-up approaches to produce routinely updated, accurate, and timely deprived area maps. In this review, we first assess the strengths and limitations of existing deprived area mapping methods. We then propose an Integrated Deprived Area Mapping System (IDeAMapS) framework that leverages the strengths of EO- and community-based approaches. The proposed framework offers a way forward to map deprived areas globally, routinely, and with maximum accuracy to support SDG 11 monitoring and the needs of different interest groups.

Item Type:Articles
Additional Information:Funding: The research pertaining to these results received financial aid from the Federal Science Policy according to the agreement of subsidy no. (SR/11/380) (SLUMAP: http://slumap.ulb.be/) and from NWO grant number VI. Veni. 194.025.
Status:Published
Refereed:Yes
Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID:Porto de Albuquerque, Professor Joao
Creator Roles:
Porto de Albuquerque, J.Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing – original draft
Authors: Kuffer, M., Thomson, D. R., Boo, G., Mahabir, R., Grippa, T., Vanhuysse, S., Engstrom, R., Ndugwa, R., Makau, J., Darin, E., Porto de Albuquerque, J., and Kabaria, C.
College/School:College of Social Sciences > School of Social and Political Sciences > Urban Studies
Journal Name:Remote Sensing
Publisher:MDPI
ISSN:2072-4292
ISSN (Online):2072-4292
Published Online:18 March 2020
Copyright Holders:Copyright © 2020 by the authors
First Published:First published in Remote Sensing 12(6):982
Publisher Policy:Reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence

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