Abstract

Accurate quantification of vertical structure (or 3D structure) and its change of a city is essential for understanding the evolution of urban form, and its social and ecological consequences. Previous studies have largely focused on the horizontal structure (or 2D structure), but few on 3D structure, especially for long time changes, due to the absence of such historical data. Here, we present a new approach for 3D reconstruction of urban history, which was applied to characterize the urban 3D structure and its change from 1986 to 2017 in Shenzhen, a megacity in southern China. This approach integrates the contemporary building height obtained from the increasingly available data of building footprint with building age estimated based on the long-term observations from time-series Landsat imagery. We found: (1) the overall accuracy for building change detection was 87.80%, and for the year of change was 77.40%, suggesting that the integrated approach provided an effective method to cooperate horizontal (i.e., building footprint), vertical (i.e., building height), and temporal information (i.e., building age) to generate the historical data for urban 3D reconstruction. (2) The number of buildings increased dramatically from 1986 to 2017, by eight times, with an increased proportion of high-rise buildings. (3) The old urban areas continued to have the highest density of buildings, with increased average height of buildings, but there were two emerging new centers clustered with high-rise buildings. The long-term urban 3D maps allowed characterizing the spatiotemporal patterns of the vertical dimension at the city level, which can enhance our understanding on urban morphology.

Highlights

  • IntroductionWith massive population moving into cities, the cities tend to grow more vertically in addition to outward expansion [3,4]

  • We present a new approach for 3D reconstruction of urban history, which was applied to characterize the urban 3D structure and change, using the city of Shenzhen as a case study

  • We first developed a new approach for the 3D reconstruction of urban history and applied it to investigate the urban 3D structure and change over time, using the city of Shenzhen as a case study

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Summary

Introduction

With massive population moving into cities, the cities tend to grow more vertically in addition to outward expansion [3,4]. Such changes in urban form have remarkable social and ecological consequences, and thereby urban sustainability [4,5,6,7]. Numerous studies have been conducted to characterize urban form and its change from a horizontal (i.e., 2D) perspective, and to examine the social and ecological impacts [8,9,10,11,12,13]. While the importance of the vertical dimension (i.e., 3D) of a city has been widely recognized, far fewer studies have been conducted from the vertical dimension perspective, with

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