Abstract
Abstract. The gradual spread of urbanization, the phenomenon known under the term urban sprawl, has become one of the paradigms that have characterized the urban development since the second half of the twentieth century and early twenty-first century. However, there is no unanimous consensus about what means "urbanization". The plurality of forms of human settlement on the planet difficult to identify the urbanization processes. The arrival of electrification to nearly every corner of the planet is certainly the first and more meaningful indicator of artificialization of land. In this sense, the paper proposes a new methodology based on the analysis of the satellite image of nighttime lights designed to identify the highly impacted landscapes worldwide and to build an index of Land Impacted by Light per capita (LILpc) as an indicator of the level of urbanization. The used methodology allows the identification of different typologies of urbanized areas (villages, cities or metropolitan areas), as well as “rural”, “rurban”, “periurban” and “central” landscapes. The study identifies 186,134 illuminated contours (urbanized areas). In one hand, 404 of these contours could be consider as real “metropolitan areas”; and in the other hand, there are 161,821 contours with less than 5,000 inhabitants, which could be identify as “villages”. Finally, the paper shows that 44.5 % live in rural areas, 15.5 % in rurban spaces, 26.2 % in suburban areas and only 18.4 % in central areas.
Highlights
The second half of the twentieth century has been, without doubt, the time when there has been further development of urbanization on a global scale
The present paper proposes a methodology to study the impact of urbanization in the world using the nighttime lights
Transformation of nighttime lights image into a point file allows the realization of a logistic regression with the US Urban Areas (UA)3 as a urban areas in 33 countries or areas, including all the successor States of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics; and criteria related to the functional nature of urban areas, such as the existence of paved streets, water-supply systems, sewerage systems or electric lighting, were part of the definition of urban in 43 cases, but only in ten cases such a criteria was used alone
Summary
The second half of the twentieth century has been, without doubt, the time when there has been further development of urbanization on a global scale. The urban model has suffered significant changes in last decades, transforming from a model of urban continuum of medium and high densities to a model of an endless diffuse and sprawled city, driven by technological innovation processes, separation of functions and searching the proximity to the nature (Tsai, 2005). This redefinition of the spatial model has based on new communication networks and infrastructures. Landscapes highly artificialized have become from "islands" within the "rural ocean" to "colonize" almost the entire planet. The process of urban sprawl has relegated to open spaces the role of auxiliary elements within the spatial structure
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