Remotely sensing urban well-being

Session Title: 

Remotely sensing urban well-being: bridging the data gap

Organized by:

Focus:

With most of the world’s population living in urban areas, it is important to understand how these environments relate to urban residents’ well-being. Earth Observation data is instrumental in quantifying and monitoring the urban environments that people are exposed to on a regional to global scale. A combination of EO data with data on human well-being offers great potential for studying global urban well-being patterns and their relationship with urban environments. However, both EO and well-being data have their own challenges and limitations. One example is the difficulty of quantifying urban environmental metrics such that they are meaningful for human well-being, e.g. some literature questions the use of Land Surface Temperature (LST) measurements for human thermal comfort. What’s more, linking the two datasets is not that straightforward. For example, while EO data typically comes in raster format, well-being data is more often available for administrative boundaries or point locations. 

This session invites contributions that aim to quantify remotely sensed urban environmental properties in a meaningful way and/or link EO data to data on urban well-being, with a special emphasis on the methods used. We especially welcome contributions on a global scale or with a focus on understudied countries.