Dear Colleagues,

Urban morphology has been described as “the study of the city as human habitat” (Moudon 1997). It embraces a diversity of methods and techniques, from town planning analysis to space syntax and geographic information systems. Remote sensing technologies have become an increasingly important element of the urban morphologist’s toolkit, used to map, model, monitor and assess the physical conditions of urban areas worldwide. Cities are the physical expression of myriad interacting economic and social processes, often described as urban metabolism. Accordingly, different properties, compositions and arrangements of buildings, artificial surfaces and open space can influence the urban microclimate, greenspace provision, traffic congestion, anthropogenic heat, air and water quality and surface runoff, both separately and concurrently. These conditions are highly dynamic and heterogenous; they vary in time, space, scale and intensity.

In today’s circumstances of rapid urbanisation, better understanding and addressing of the environmental, social and economic effects of the formation and transformation of urban form are urgently required, necessitating new multi-disciplinary and multi-faceted approaches. This could help to solve pressing local and global environmental issues, and facilitate the better planning and design of our “human habitat”. In this Special Issue, we encourage submissions applying remote sensing approaches to analyse the complex, dynamic and multi-temporal interactions between urban morphology and the metabolic aspects of the built environment. Contributions should emphasise quantitative and empirical studies and may focus on one or more of the following aspects:

• Multi-disciplinary, multi-temporal and multi-scale methods and approaches to better understand the interactions between changes in urban morphology and carbon emissions, energy efficiency, urban overheating, pollution (air quality), anthropogenic heat production, water quality and runoff, mortality and morbidity, and more.
• Novel methods and technologies combining remotely sensed and image processing data (i.e., LiDAR, spectral and thermal imagery) to map, model, monitor, and analyse urban morphology more rapidly, efficiently and accurately.
• Application of three-dimensional (3D) approaches, including vertical and horizontal surfaces, for modelling urban morphology conditions and analysing its impact on the outdoor environment.
• Novel indicators, parameters and spatial metrics for the performance-based analysis of urban morphology.
• Implications of spatial, temporal, spectral and radiometric resolution on the characterisation of urban morphology and its impacts on the environmental conditions of urban areas.
• Remote sensing approaches describing urban land cover/land use as continuum phenomena and their implications on heat island and cool island formation.

Reference

Moudon, A.V., 1997. Urban morphology as an emerging interdisciplinary field. Urban morphology, 1(1), pp. 3-10.

Dr. Carlos Bartesaghi Koc
Dr. Paul Osmond
Guest Editors

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• Urban form
• Dynamic performance-based analysis
• Spatio-temporal change-detection
• LiDAR
• Spectral and thermal imagery
• 3D urban morphology
• Multi-disciplinary assessment