THE POTENTIAL OF NIGHTTIME SPACE IMAGERY IN ANALYSIS AND MAPPING OF URBAN SETTLEMENT

A procedure is described for the use of nighttime space imagery in the mapping of an urban settlement hierarchy in the Federal Republic of Germany. City “brightness” values provide surrogate measures of urban settlement density, which are then mapped isarithmically. The resulting statistical surface is then divided into regions (first- and second-order settlement systems), and the map compared with one produced by quantitative (cluster analysis) techniques. The two regionalization schemes produce remarkably similar results, although the map compiled from the space image contained a greater number of regions, and was more detailed in other ways. Translated from: Vestnik Leningradskogo Universiteta, seriya geografiches-kaya, 1984, No. 6, pp. 112-114.