Urbogeosystemic Approach to Agglomeration Study within the Urban Remote Sensing Frameworks

Abstract

The spatial arrangement of human activity within urban areas is normally provided by areal management, and its effective provision is a complicated problem. The current urban development causes a number of problems and urgent challenges, which can be met and resolved exclusively on the basis of innovative scientific and technological advances. The main research objective of this chapter is to represent the authors’ theoretic concept of the urban geographical system combined with the original Urban Remote Sensing approach based on the advanced technique of airborne LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) data processing. The authors attempted to prove that the presented concept could contribute to an understanding of the urban agglomeration as an urbanized spatial entity. The chapter explains in what way the urbanistic environment is a quasi-rasterized 3D model of actual city space, and the urbogeosystem (UGS) is a quasi-vector 3D model of the hierarchical formalized aggregate of UGS elementary functional units–buildings, both can efficiently simulate and visualize an urbanized area. Web-based geoinformation software for LiDAR data processing with the objectives of urban studies has been introduced together with its key functionalities. The population estimation use case has been examined in detail within the presented approach frameworks.