Sustainable Infrastructure, Environmental and Resource Management for Highly Dynamic Metropolises
Rapid Planning is an action-oriented research project that has been developed and is funded under the umbrella of the Future Megacities Research Program of the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF). It seeks to develop a rapid trans-sectoral urban planning methodology, specifically targeting supply and disposal infrastructure. The service sectors covered by the project include energy, water, waste water/sanitation, solid waste and urban agriculture/food. The purpose is thereby to aid the realization of synergies between supply and disposal infrastructure sectors and to achieve mutually reinforcing solutions that are both cost effective and energy and resource efficient.
New York City (Photo: Felix Bachofer)
The Geoinformatics unit of the University of Tuebingen develops and applies geospatial methods and techniques for different fields of research. Our research foci are in the field of environmental monitoring and management of natural resources using qualitative and quantitative methods. Remote sensing is an important part of our methodological toolset. We possess expertise with medium to high resolution optical as well as microwave data. Our tasks in the Rapid Planning project include:
Urban remote sensing
Geospatial analysis
Spatial database management
WebGIS development
Kigali (Photo: Felix Bachofer)
The focus of the spatial analysis is on the identification of building footprints and the classification of building archetypes, as well as the delineation of urban structure types (USTs) from satellite remote sensing data. For the analysis very high resolution remote sensing images are utilized (World-View-2, GeoEye and Pléiades). The methodological approach includes object based image analysis (OBIA), Support Vector Machines (SVM) and rule-based classification methods.
