Monitoring of green, open and sealed urban space

In recent decades, urban sprawl became a serious European-wide problem, not only due to total land taken, but also due to its spatial distribution patterns and quality of the land consumed. Land use efficiency is becoming a prime political objective at both European and city level, and the EU Land Communication aims to establish 'zero net land take' across the EU by 2050. Land is a finite resource and therefore the sprawl has to be regulated. This can be realized through careful management of urban land, applying the concept of urban land transformation. The other main concern of sustainable city panning is the preservation and improvement of the Green Infrastructure in the cities. Only such approaches can assure sustainable development of European urban and suburban landscape as well as of quality of environment and life in the cities in the long term perspective. The EU funded URBIS project (ICT PSP 2014-17) targets these issues and focuses on investigation of open space potential in urban areas, and the opportunities for inner development, as well as on investigation of urban green systems. URBIS delivers EO based methodologies and tools to provide accurate up-to-date intelligence that is comparable across European cities to support the definition and implementation of sustainable planning and governance strategies in cities and city-regions throughout Europe. The present paper focuses on the role, within the URBIS methodologies and products, of remote sensing image analysis. Classification, feature extraction, and multitemporal analysis approaches are combined to characterize open, green, and sealed areas within large urban zones.