MAPPING THE URBAN STRUCTURES OF THE MEGACITY ISTANBUL BY MEANS OF HIGHRESOLUTION SATELLITE IMAGES

Abstract

According to the UN, more than half of the world population is already living in urban areas, around 6,8% thereof in socalled megacities, whose spatial dynamic is often difficult to keep track of, due to the high concentration of people who live in a relatively small area. The amount of people living in cities in general and in megacities in particular is going to increase further until 2030, which is why the study of megacities is getting more and more relevant as an object of research for Geography and remote sensing. The paper deals with the creation of an object-based land use and land cover classification of the most Southeast European megacity Istanbul, derivation of urban structure types based on this classification. WorldView satellite images with very high resolution have been used for this study. The results show that it is possible to differentiate between urban structure types simply based on a land use and land cover classification without additional data like cadastral or height information.

Keywords

• lu/lc classification
• urban structure types (ust)
• remote sensing
• istanbul