Publication

Though urbanization is often linked to development gains, some regions in Asia, Latin America, and Sub-Saharan Africa have grown in urban population, while remaining bereft of basic services like reliable electricity. Daytime optical remote sensing has tracked urban land cover change for decades, but there have been few studies that have monitored whether infrastructure is keeping pace with demographic and land transitions. Here, we explore how fusing multi-temporal population and land data with nighttime lights data, derived from the Suomi-NPP VIIRS Day Night Band, can add to our understanding of urban infrastructural transitions. We classify urban changes in India and the US, using these three measures in tandem to create a typology of urban development processes. When compared against survey data, our results indicate the classification can track rural electrification and identify growing informal settlements with inadequate infrastructure, and is therefore useful for monitoring progress towards two Sustainable Development Goals: Goal 7.1 (ensure universal access to affordable, reliable and modern energy services) and Goal 11.1 (ensure access for all to adequate, safe and affordable housing and basic services and upgrade slums). The classification results also illustrate the diversity of urban development processes, and how uni-dimensional measures of urbanization, greatly under-represent urban change, particularly in high-income countries.