Analyzing segregation of informal residents in Latin American Cities’ periphery using Remote Sensing

Abstract

The urban pattern has changed significantly in Latin American cities over the last decades. Since the 1980s, urban policies have increased the periphery land value, promoting suburbanization that restricted spaces for informal settlers. The study used Landsat imagery to analyze if urban pattern changes in Bogota, Colombia and Sao Paulo, Brazil forced informal settlements to move closer to environmental risk areas or areas with limited mobility. This research used a stratified supervised classification to locate formal and informal developments in 2000 and 2018, followed by multiple criteria evaluation to categorize environmental risk and mobility in the study area. The results revealed that segregation in the periphery of cities is not a generalized pattern in the city periphery but a localized phenomenon encouraged by urban policies.