Prediction of Socio-Economic Indicators for Urban Planning Using VHR Satellite Imagery and Spatial Analysis.

Ongoing urbanization leads to steady growth of urban areas. In the case of highly dynamic change of municipalities, due to the rates of change, responsible administrations often are challenged or struggle with capturing present states of urban sites or accurately planning future urban development. An interest for urban planning lies on socio-economic conditions, as consumption and production of disposable goods are related to economic possibilities. Therefore, we developed an approach to generate relevant parameters for infrastructure planning by means of remote sensing and spatial analysis. In this study, the single building defines the spatial unit for the parameters. In the case city Belmopan (Belize), based on WorldView-1 data we manually define a city covering building dataset. Residential buildings are classified to eight building types which are locally adapted to Belmopan. A random forest (RF) classifier is trained with locally collected training data. Through household interviews focusing on household assets, income and educational level, a socio-economic point (SEP) scaling is defined, which correlates very well with the defined building typology. In order to assign socio-economic parameters to the single building, five socio-economic classes (SEC) are established based on SEP statistics for the building types. The RF building type classification resulted in high accuracies. Focusing on the three categories to describe residential socio-economic states allowed high correlations between the defined building and socio-economic points. Based on the SEP we projected a citywide residential socio-economic building classification to support supply and disposal infrastructure planning.