Center for Environmental Science Applications (CESA)

Finding solutions to sustainability challenges by linking ideas, people and resources
Home

The 100 Cities Project is a platform designed to bring policymakers and researchers together to apply urban remote sensing to the problems of urbanization, the environment, and sustainability.We seek to create meaningful partnerships with cities internationally. As we build our partnerships, we can then develop models of how best to address cities’ problems with urban remote sensing. At the same time we are developing relationships with academic researchers who produce urban remote sensing products and use them in their models.

Our Goals:
  • Make urban remote sensing products and processes useful and available to cities for planning and policy making through outreach and partnerships.

  • Use mapping and modeling results of our urban remote sensing research to advance the understanding of urban development trajectories and urban "futures".

  • Develop an international network of urban data providers, researchers, and end-users to rapidly disseminate and archive data, analytical approaches, and results.
Our Research:
We are growing our team of researchers and practitioners here at ASU and at other institutions around the world that share datasets and collaborate on publications and research with the 100 Cities Project and among other researchers.
We conduct work on three levels: 
  1. Individual Cities: In-depth specific focus on individual members of the 100 Cities - these cities have researchers and practitioners available to collaborate with us.
  2. Categories of Cities:  Mapping and modeling of urban/peri-urban (suburban) climatic, ecologic, and social properties (both current and historic) across multiple cities for detailed comparative study of differing natural environments and urban planning policies.
  3. All 100 Cities: Basic data for all 100 Cities to compare effects of urbanization and supply the international community with standardized urban remote sensing datasets. This includes temperature, vegetation, land classification, and social data. We also provide timely and continuous monitoring of rapidly urbanizing regions using ASTER (and other) remotely sensed datasets.