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Hyperspectral applications
• Regional and city planning
Introduction
    Land is becoming an ever-scarcer good. Only 11% of the land surface not covered by ice is easy to cultivate. However, this land is being exposed to sharply increasing pressure due to the flight from the cities to the suburbs in the West, and the population and flight from the countryside in the developing countries. The urban population is increasing there by 3.6 % annually.
This means that the infrastructure for transport, housing, drinking water supply and everything necessary for making economic growth and job creation possible must be constantly extended and adapted. Thus, there is clearly a need for policies which steer this growth in the right direction.

Sustainable regional and urban planning must result in a:

  • Better quality of the urban environment, whereby respect for a city's past is coupled to an accommodation of current and future needs
  • Communities which are socially and environmentally sustainable
  • Efficient spatial organisation of human activities
  • "Intelligent" growth of the urban pattern

Satellite images are ideal for urban and regional planning because, with a high frequency, they give a comprehensive image of the urban pattern set within the context of the city's hinterland. They form a functional, highly accessible source of data for the GIS. The simplest use of satellite images in GIS for regional planning is as an underlying reference layer which makes it possible to visualise often-abstract data sets concerning demography, land use, and so on. In a following step, the satellite images can be processed to obtain information about (inter alia) land use and topography. The repercussions of various alternative policy measures on land use can be tested with models which are fed with time series of satellite images from the recent past. Land-use trends identified on the basis of satellite images are more accurate than those obtained from on-site measurement data.

Regional planning based on satellite images is also useful in areas which have suffered devastation, whether caused by people or nature. In Bosnia, satellite images taken after the war were compared with historical data to quickly determine what had changed, what infrastructure was destroyed, and what had to be replaced.