Urbanization and Landscape Change: Tools for Analyzing Socioeconomic and Environmental Issues

Dear Colleagues,

Urbanization, understood as a multidimensional process, implies socioeconomic and environmental changes, alters urban form and size and population density and distribution, changes land use and land cover, and contributes to climate change and pollution, among other issues, at local, regional, continental, and global scales. Therefore, promoting sustainable urbanization, limiting natural land consumption, and ensuring the well-being of the population have become policy targets for urban and landscape planners.

The spatial structure of urban areas and urban area growth patterns influence how the physical, socioeconomic, and environmental characteristics of urban areas change over time. These interrelationships play a major role in the daily life of urban dwellers and lead decision-makers to seek better-informed choices for the sustainable planning of urban areas. Thus, a better understanding of the relationships between the spatial structure of urban areas and the socioeconomic performance of urban areas is of crucial relevance.

Earth observation (EO) provides timely, accurate, and frequent data, along with the tools to capture urbanization and landscape changes at different levels, from coarse to fine resolutions, in a consistent way, which is of prevailing relevance to monitor landscapes. In this context, monitoring, quantifying, and characterizing the progress of urban areas enriches our understanding of past and present trends, provides evidence-based information, supports decision-making processes, and allows unsustainable patterns and their potential consequences to be anticipated.

Therefore, this Special Issue will focus on the complex process of urbanization and landscape change caused by the interaction of several factors that can be simultaneously analyzed due to the ever-growing availability of tools. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the development of advanced quantitative and qualitative tools for analyzing socioeconomic and environmental issues based on EO and geographic information system (GIS) techniques, the spatio-temporal consequences of urban growth and landscape structure dynamics, as well as the urbanization patterns extracted from indicators and models.

Dr. Pere Serra
Dr. Marta Sapena
Guest Editors

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