Study Area

MURBANDY identifies "remote sensing" as a measurement procedure that can provide a synoptic view of European cities. The overall objective of MURBANDY is to provide an Earth Observation based procedure to monitor the dynamics of Europe’s settlements; to develop a number of "urban" and "environmental" indicators that allow to understand these dynamics and the impact these cities have on the environment, and finally to elaborate scenarios of urban growth at yearly intervals.

It is financed by the Centre for Earth Observation (CEO) Programme (http://ewse.ceo.org) through the DG-JRC (http://www.jrc.cec.eu.int/jrc/) and DG-ΧΙΙ.

MURBANDY is carried out for 13 cities of Europe and consists of three tasks:

• Change detection (CHANGE). Measuring changes in the spatial extent of urban areas and in urban structure in 13 cities in Europe. A period of approximately 40 years is considered.

• Understanding (UNDERSTAND). Identifying a number of environmental indicators to be used to measure the "sustainability of urban and peri-urban areas" in 5 out of the 13 selected cities. These indices could include the theoretical "ecological footprint" for the cities and the potential "carrying capacity" of urban and rural area supporting it. The two indicators above will allow deriving the "sustainable development potential" of an area – i.e. urban landscape with surrounding agricultural and forested areas.

• Development of scenarios (FORECAST). Develop "urban growth" scenarios for the five selected cities, using state of the art urban dynamics models.

The three tasks are not carried out in parallel; the activities on understanding and construction of scenarios will initiate as soon as results from the first task on single cities are available.

As far as Greece is concerned, KTIMATOLOGIO S.A. elaborates the task CHANGE of the Project for the cities of Heraklion and Nicosia. For this reason, four land use databases (one reference database and three historical) are created, presenting the urban uses of the cities within a period of 40 years.

Source: KTIMATOLOGIO S.A., Greece (MURBANDY Project, CEO/JRC, http://www.ktimatologio.gr)