What is it about?
This study developed a global atlas of urban built-up heights circa 2015 at 500-m resolution from the Sentinel-1 Ground Range Detected satellite data and investigated the inequalities in infrastructure worldwide. Results show extreme gaps in per capita urban built-up infrastructure in the Global South compared with the global average, and even larger gaps compared with the average levels in the Global North. Per capita urban built-up infrastructures in some countries in the Global North are more than 30 times higher than those in the Global South. The results also show that the built-up infrastructure in 45 countries in the Global North combined, with ∼16% of the global population, is roughly equivalent to that of 114 countries in the Global South, with ∼74% of the global population. The inequality in urban built-up infrastructure, as measured by an inequality index, is large in most countries, but the largest in the Global South compared with the Global North.
Featured Image
Photo by Andre Benz on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Information on urban built-up infrastructure is essential to understand the role of cities in shaping environmental, economic, and social outcomes. The lack of data on built-up heights over large areas has limited our ability to characterize urban infrastructure and its spatial variations across the world. The atlas of urban built-up heights from this study has the potential to improve our understanding of the effects of urbanization on raw material demand, embodied and operational energy use, and urban development intensity.
Perspectives
The extreme gap in per capita built-up infrastructure in the Global South suggests impending large global demand for materials and increases in embodied energy and greenhouse emissions if the gap is filled. The large inequality in urban built-up infrastructure worldwide implies great challenges for sustainable development, because infrastructure either directly or indirectly influences 72% of the targets of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The challenge is largest in the Global South, with greater infrastructure inequality, especially in African countries.
yuyu zhou
Iowa State University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Satellite mapping of urban built-up heights reveals extreme infrastructure gaps and inequalities in the Global South, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, November 2022, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2214813119.
You can read the full text:
Resources
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
