MAURO NORMANDO MACÊDO BARROS FILHO

Mapa Digital da Prefeitura de São Paulo

2011-12-07T17:06:00.000-08:00

A Secretaria de habitação da Prefeitura Municipal de São Paulo disponibiliza o mapa digital da cidade contendo camadas de informações com os poligonos de favelas, loteamentos e cortiços digitalizados sobre imagens de satélite em diferentes datas. Essas informações podem ser atualizadas pelos técnicos da prefeitura e disponibilizadas para qualquer usuário.

A cidade como patrimônio cultural: Campina Grande, arquitetura e urbanismo

2011-08-17T06:19:00.000-07:00

O programa de extensão A cidade como patrimônio cultural: Campina Grande, arquitetura e urbanismo se propõe a ser uma ação articulada com as atividades de ensino e pesquisa dos cursos de graduação e pós-graduação da Unidade Acadêmica de Engenharia Civil. Tem como principal objetivo conhecer, registrar, analisar e divulgar o acervo edificado tombado da região central de Campina Grande (PB), em parceria com o Instituto do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico do Estado da Paraíba e com a Prefeitura Municipal de Campina Grande. Suas principais metas são: 1) inventariar as edificações do centro antigo campinense, 2) digitalizar os projetos arquitetônicos originais das edificações do perímetro de tombamento, 3) sistematizar e georeferenciar as informações coletadas 4) divulgar o banco de dados gerado através de cartilhas e meios eletrônicos. Para tanto, serão utilizados modelos de inventário, ferramentas digitais de captura, edição e sistematização de imagens, recursos computacionais e softwares de geoprocessamento. Todas essas ferramentas intentam a constituição de um banco de dados com informações que subsidiem estudos e estratégias de difusão, visando um planejamento urbano integrado à conservação e à valorização do patrimônio cultural da cidade como parte essencial da constituição do espaço urbano de Campina Grande, tanto por setores públicos quanto por iniciativas particulares. Esse banco de dados será disponibilizado em endereço eletrônico, facilitando o acesso à informação para a sociedade em geral.

Spatial Profiles of Street Crimes

2010-07-01T17:14:00.000-07:00

The capital city of Recife in the Northeast of Brazil is known as the most dangerous city in the country. It not only presents the highest rates of youth’s assassination but is also experienced as a very insecure city due to the presence of street crime. Recife presents also high levels of poverty and social inequality. Nearly 70% of the population lives in shantytowns spread all over the city, it is spatially characterized by islands of wealth among poverty. The presence of fortuity street crime happening at any time, any place puts everyone at risk.

The sense of insecurity and fear, allied with a lack of confidence in the police, drive the inhabitants to adopt measures of individual security. While driving, the car windows are always closed, protected against internal vision and late at night, as a rule, no one dares to stop at a red light. High walls, iron bars, electric fences, armed gatekeepers, video surveillance are the most common features of residential buildings. All these measures make public spaces and the public interface, mainly sidewalks, more insecure, empty of movement and prone to crime.

This work was set up to study the spatial pattern of crime occurred in the city’s wealthier neighborhood: the beach of Boa Viagem, famous among tourists. This study intends to identify the main spatial factors related to different crimes. The different crimes were characterized by the nature of offence as well as type of weapon and strategy of eviction. Each crime is associated to a spatial profile describing overall qualities of the area of the occurrence. The spatial profile compiles eight items related to global and local accessibility, land use and density, visual qualities of the interface and architectural features of the surroundings. The profiles informs the numbers of interfaces (doors, gates), the quality of lighting and the presence of obstacles. Other location features were also considered such as proximities to market places, shopping centers and poor neighborhoods. The mapping of crimes alows the micro description on crime locations. Spatial aspects such as global and local accessibility were described by means of space syntax measurements as well as the quality of vision lines.

The study relies on 3 years of official data regarding crime locations. The spatial profiles were analysed by means of multidimensional statistic analysis. A Partial Scalogram Analysis was useful to describe qualitative and quantitative features of crime spatial profiles. Local results contradict international findings showing different spatial logic for the occurrence of crimes. There is no correlation of robbery with more segregated streets as shown by other international studies (Hillier and Shu, 2000).

The study "Spatial Profiles of Street Crimes" is a part of a research that has been carrying out at Laboratory of Technologies for the City (LATTICE) in the Post-Graduation Program on Urban Development (MDU) of Federal University of Pernambuco(UFPE).

The preliminar results of this study were presented on the 8th National Crime Mapping Conference held in Manchester from 10 to 11 June 2010. They were also presented on a seminar promoted by the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) of University College London (UCL) held on 16 June 2010, in London.

On the left: Spencer Chainey, director of Geographical Information Science at the Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science, University College London, and chairman of the 8th Crime Mapping Conference. On the right: Mauro Normando M. Barros Filho, researcher of the Lab of Technologies for the City, Federal University of Pernambuco.

New Publication: Scales of Intra-Urban Diversity

2010-02-23T10:30:00.000-08:00

The book "Escalas da Diversidade Intraurbana" (Scales of Intra-Urban Diversity)is aimed at learning the effects of scale upon understanding intra-urban sociospatial diversity. In order to attain this objective, the study was broken down into six parts. In the first four, a theoretical approach towards intra–urban models is developed, considering their principles and methods of manipulating spatial data. In the last two, an impirical investigation of the sociospatial diversity of the city of Recife is carried out at different periods and on different scales. In the first part, we seek to address the main intra-urban models that have been used to describe sociospatial patterns considering a single scale of analysis. In the second, we seek to investigate the methods that have been applied for the representation of intra-urban structure. In the third, methods of spatial data analysis are adopted that are based on the hypotheses of self-correlation of geostatistics and self-similarity to the fractal theory. In the fourth, multiscale intra-urban models based on the hypothesis of spatial self-organization are analysed. In the fifth, an historical background to the main actions, plans and information adopted with the aim of controlling and understanding Recife’s sociospatial diversity is studied. In the sixth and final part, we demonstrate how this diversity may be learnt on various scales from the development of a methodology using census data and satellite images. The recomposition of the input developed in each of these parts permits the conclusion that the Recife’s social patterns are spatially dependent and manifested on many scales, there being a tendency for areas with better living conditions in the city to remain smaller and more grouped when analysed on a single scale, and more disperse, when analysed on larger scales.

"This book stands out, at the same time, for its theoretical deep and methodological rigour, intrisic qualities of the homonimous thesis (which I had the honour to be a member of the examination board) and the characteristics of the author as a researcher. At the same time, it preserves the necessary didatic posture, which anables the almost natural conversion of the thesis into a book of public interest that will welcome those (academics or not) attracted for the mutiple faces of the social and urban diversity, and its physical and spatial effects in cities, particularly in Recife. The first part of the book synthetizes, in a descriptive and dissertative manner, the theories and representation (idealization) models of the cities, preparing the readers to a precise diving into the reality of a city whose socio-spatial diversity is at the same time its richness and historical problem. The theoretical synthesis of the four initial precised and well referenced chapters discusses about a still little known issue which has been revealed little by little on urban studies, based on the recognition of the complexity, descentralization, non-linearity, and multiplicity of city scales as a phenomenon and object of study. This initial theoretical rigour added to the dissertative rigour and analytical precision at the final part of the book is translated into a work which already occupies an enhanced place on the contemporary thinking about the urban development in Brazil."
Dr. Fabiano Sobreira, professor UNICEUB.

"The city is the greatest and most complex human artefact. It is a expression of economic forces; it is a product of empirical sciences; but also it is locus of the social living and interaction. It is not possible to syncronically understand all social processes that operate inside it; neither those that constitute the relation between closer and remote urban spaces. Maybe this is one of the reason why the urban object interests so many knowledge fields and being permited the required integration of researchers from different scientific and artistic underground. Mauro Normando Macêdo Barros Filho is one of these researchers who investigate this fantastic human creation through a multidisciplinary prism, searching for new questions that reveal new answers (or new answers to reveal new questions)in order to comprehend much better its socio-spatial dynamics. He arguments that studies based on multiscale models permit a much better identification, representation, description, and analysis of urban phenomena, in particular they help on the understanding of the dynamics in diacronic studies and the sociospatial intra-urban diversity. This book should attract students and researchers who search for new question or answers (or new answers and questions) about the city. Here they will find approaches and analytical procedures to enrich their understandings."
Dr. Luiz Amorim, professor UFPE.

The book has 340 pages, 65 illustrations,34 graphs, and 16 tables. It was written in Portuguese and is available on Brazilian bookshops such as Livraria Cultura, Livraria Imperatriz , and Livraria Jaqueira. For more information about how to purchase it please contact me by email.

Urban space and image: converging configuration and texture analysis

2009-10-26T05:36:00.000-07:00

The article presents the results of an investigation that aims at integrating different approaches to the analysis of the urban form. The proposed methodology integrates two lines of investigation: a) texture analysis of high resolution satellite images using fractal and lacunarity measures to describe the spatial distribution of pixels with similar gray levels; b) Visual Graph Analysis (VGA) that describes visual and access properties of urban open spaces. A second order analysis is proposed in order to describe the texture of VGA maps and investigate to what extent the underlying configurational and texture patterns are correlated.

The figure below shows the visual connectivity of 4 urban fragments from the city of Recife, Brazil. The light areas in each fragment correspond to the most visually connected public spaces.

This article was published on the annals of the 16th International Seminar on Urban Form held in Guangzhou (China) from 4 to 7 September 2009.

Detecting intra-urban morphological patterns through interpolation by Ordinary Kriging of lacunarity values from VHR satellite images

2009-06-30T01:21:00.000-07:00

This paper describes a method for detecting intra-urban morphological patterns through interpolation of lacunarity values generated from high spatial resolution satellite images. This method was applied in an area with 1,500 x 1,500 meters, located in Recife, Brazil, which is comprised of two informal settlements separated to each other by a formal urban area.

Figure 1: Location of the study area and its subareas

Firstly, lacunariry values were extracted from 168 QuickBird image samples of this area, with 75 x 75 meters in size and 0.60 meters in spatial resolution. Then, these values were assigned to georeferenced centroid points of each image sample and interpolated by Ordinary Kriging. Finally, the generated image was classified through a K-Means algorithm. The lacunarity analysis was run considering 5 different box sizes, and the classified images with each box size were overlaid to describe the morphological pattern through several scales.

Figure 2: Image generated through the overlay of the 5 classified images

The results showed that the lacunarity values were very sensitive to the texture variation of the selected images. Image samples with high lacunarity correspond to intra-urban areas composed of relatively big buildings and large roads, whereas image samples with low lacunarity correspond to denser and more compact intra-urban areas composed by small buildings, narrow and tortuous alleys. In the end it was possible to detect different intra-urban morphological patterns between the formal and informal areas, but within the informal areas as well.

The paper was presented on the 11th International Conference on Computers in Urban Planning and Urban Management - CUPUM which was held from 16 to 18 June 2009, in Hong Kong.

Urban texture and space configuration: analyzing Recife’s urban fragments

2009-06-29T23:39:00.001-07:00

This paper reports the first stage of an ongoing research which main interest is to integrate two distinct approaches to the analysis of urban phenomena – image texture analysis and space syntax –, aiming at a better description and understanding of complex intra-urban socio-spatial patterns. On the one hand, satellite image texture analysis distinguished morphological patterns from urban areas with different inhabitability conditions, as previous studies have are already demonstrated. On the other hand, the constitution map texture analysis revealed distinct patterns according to different social and urban dynamics, according to urban form, size and land use, in such way that compact, highly parceled and constituted patterns tend to present low levels of mean lacunarity, whereas disperse, non-parceled and poorly constituted ones tend to present high levels of mean lacunarity. Such findings show that the texture analysis combining satellite images and interface maps is a very promising research for understanding the relationship between morphological and social patterns, and deserves future investigations.

This paper was published on the annals of the 7th International Space Sintax Symposium held on 8 to 11 July in Stockholm, Sweden.

Informal real estate market for housing at Recife Metropolitan Region: an initial approach

2009-04-21T11:26:00.000-07:00

The book Producción inmobiliaria y reestruturación metropolitana en América Latina was published by Pontifica Universidad Católica de Chile and Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo da Universidade de São Paulo, and edited by Paulo Cesar Xavier Pereira and Rodrigo Hidalgo. The book aims to inquiry about the different influences on the real estate re-struturation that models present Latin American metropolises. Moreover, it intends to give a broad picture of the discussion among researchers, professionals, and academics from several disciplines which are interested on urban studies in different Latin American countries. It is an expression of the necessary debate between the Iberic American world that speaks Portuguese and Spanish, in order to comprehend Latin American reality, which differences and similarities need to be urgently addressed to construct a theory for explaining (not excluding what happens in the rest of the world) its own reality.

The chapter Funcionamento do mercado de habitações nas áreas pobres da Região Metropolitana do Recife: uma primeira aproximação, written by Norma Lacerda, Júlia Morim, and Mauro Barros Filho, aims to contribute on the discussion about the operational mechanisms of the informal real estate market in a set of poor areas of Recife Metropolitan Region (RMR), based on the preliminary results of a questionnaire applied in such areas. These results were presented and discussed considering the similarities and specificities of the informal real estate market in relation to the theory which fundaments the formal one. In this context, the investigation presents: (i) the reasons why to invest on the understanding of informal real estate market; (ii) the dimensions of the poor areas in RMR; (iii) the criteria which help on the selection of the poor areas; (iv) and the interpretation of the answers to the questions address to their inhabitants. The results permit the identification of the main elements which delineate the operational mechanisms of the informal real estate market.

The city and its cartographic representations

2009-04-21T09:08:00.000-07:00

Maps are models for representing cities, primordial on the development of urban studies, projects, and plans. The production of maps requires technical and artistic knowledges. Otherwise it would lead to a distorted reading and interpretation of urban phenomena and processes, as well as to non-adequate urban proposes. This paper aims to present and discuss the limits and possibilities of Cartography to represent cities. Initially it is done a brief review of the concepts of maps, considering their types and applications. Then it is analyzed the characteristics of four basic cartographic elements applied in the representation of cities: coordinate, symbol, scale, and projection. In the end, it is made some comments about the relationship between representation and reality.

For more details see the complete version of this paper published on the new edition of the online scientific journal HUMANAE.

Experiences on the elaboration of Participative Master Plans in Da Mata Mesoregion of Pernambuco, Brazil

2009-02-18T11:14:00.000-08:00

The present paper is a synthesis of the experiences done during the elaboration of Participative Master Plans (PDP) in Da Mata Mesoregion of Pernambuco. The main objective is to confront the methodology developed for the elaboration of these plans with the results obtained, considering the socio-territorial, socio-economic, and historic-cultural specificities of this mesoregion. In order to achieve this, four parts compose the paper. In the first, it is realized a brief contextualization of the legal basis available for the elaboration of PDP and the operational basis established by state of Pernambuco Government for this. In the second, “the municipality we have”, it was described the methodology developed and the results obtained from the diagnosis of four municipalities located in Mata Sul Development Region (RD) of state of Pernambuco: Amaraji, Escada, Gameleira, and Ribeirão. In the third, “the municipality we want”, it is presented the methodology developed and the results obtained from the proposals for these municipalities. Finally, in the last part, it is presented some final considerations about these experiences.

More details about these experiences can be seen on the complete version of this paper published on the first edition of HUMANAE, an online scientific journal published every six month by Faculty Esuda, Brazil.

Accuracy of lacunarity algorithms in texture classification of high spatial resolution images from urban areas

2008-10-20T17:40:00.000-07:00

Lacunarity based measures can be described as texture recognition approaches that provide a flexible yet theoretically consistent mean of characterizing the morphology of urban spatial patterns across different scales. This paper proposes a comparison between the Gliding-Box and Differential Box-Counting algorithms based on the concept of lacunarity to recognize and classify textures of urban areas with different inhabitability conditions through the analysis of binary and grayscale images from 30 ® Quickbird sensor image samples from Recife (Brazil), captured in October 2001, with 250 x 250 meters in size. Results show that the Differential Box Counting algorithm applied in grayscale images improves the discrimination between textures from urban areas with different inhabitability conditions, and it reveals a strong correlation between urban morphology and socioeconomic patterns.

More details are described on the paper Accuracy of lacunarity algorithms in texture classification of high spatial resolution images from urban areas which was published on the annals of the XXI Congress of the International Society for Photogrametry and Remote Sensing-ISPRS, held on 3-11 July 2008, in Beijing, China.

Urban textures and morphological distinctions

2008-10-07T08:10:00.000-07:00

The study verifies the differences between urban morphological patterns according to the texture analysis of satellite picture fragments of Recife, considering the complex combination among its visual elements (water surfaces, vegetation, buildings, pavement, etc.). It presents the concept of lacunarity and introduces sub fragment analysis aiming at capturing subtleties in urban morphology.

For more information see the paper Texturas urbanas e distinções morfológicas which was presented and published at II Simpósio Brasileiro de Ciências Geodésicas e Tecnologias da Geoinformação (SIMGEO), in Recife.

Urban Management and Informal Settlement Regularisation Course at IHS

2008-10-07T07:27:00.000-07:00

From 31 July to 29 August 2008, Mauro Normando M. Barros Filho participates on the Land Management and Informal Settlement Regularization course at the Institute for Housing and Development Studies (IHS), an international centre of excellence associated with the Erasmus University Rotterdam that, since 1958, offers specialized postgraduate education, training, advisory services and applied research in the fields of urban management, housing and urban environment.

The principal aim of the course was to develop human resources together with institutional capacities, offering a thorough understanding of urban theory and best practices to face the increasingly complex challenges relating to social, economic, physical and environmental concerns of land management and informal settlement regularization.

The course was very intensive and stimulated exchange of experience and views, forcing the students to have an active participation and give inputs and academic contributions during the sessions, discussions and case study presentations. The staff involved were Carlos Morales Schechinger, Martim Smolka, Claudio Acioly, Saskia Ruijsink, Banashree Banerjee and Edésio Fernandes, each one covering a specific part of the programme and contributing with specific case studies linked to legal, economic, policy, management and institutional dimensions of the course. In the end, each participant presented an individual action plan and a brief workshop paper describing how the lessons learned during the course can be implemented in their daily activities.

From left to right: Merle Salgado, Paulo Glória, Marigoh Helene, Shuaibu Ali, Priscilla Achakpa, Annalyn Jagunos, Mauro Barros Filho, and Filipe de Souza

Geoprocessing on urban planning and urban management

2008-06-28T12:35:00.001-07:00

During the last years, geoprocessing techniques have increasingly being used on urban planning and urban management. This is, in part, related with the evolution of the informatics, as well as the increase availability of spatially referenced data of the population and of the physical environment. Private and governmental companies have created departments to register, to map, and to monitor urban projects, plans, and programmes. Many undergraduate and post-graduate courses on urban planning and urban management have already included disciplines of Cartography, Geodesy, Topography, Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing, and Geographical Information Systems (GIS).

In this context, the paper Geoprocessamento no planejamento e na gestão de cidades, published on the annals of the I Congresso Nacional de Desenvolvimento Regional (CONDER), aims to do a brief discussion about the need and importance of geoprocessing techniques on urban planning and urban management. Firstly, it describes basic notions of urban planning and urban management, as well as its challeges due to the complexity and dynamics of the contemporary cities. Secondly, it is presented some concepts and objectives of geoprocessing and GIS. Finally, it is shown some applications of geoprocessing techniques on urban planning and urban management.

Expert group meeting on slum mapping

2008-05-27T10:01:00.000-07:00

As a part of the effort to monitor Target 11 of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG's), UNHABITAT's Global Urban Observatory , the International Institute for Geoinformation Science and Earth Observation (ITC), The Netherlands, and the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, USA, organized a 3 day expert meeting on Very High Resolution Satellite imagery (VHRSI) application on slum mapping and monitoring. The meeting, which was held at ITC's facilities in Enschede, The Netherlands from 21-23 May 2008, brought together 25 experts on VHRSI application on slum mapping from around the world to present methods and techniques for mapping and monitoring slum development with remote sensing and GIS technologies.

The goal of the MDG Target-ll is to significantly improve the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers by 2020. Although considerable work has been done on monitoring the state of slum dwellers statistically, a peer-review composed of the World Bank, Cities Alliance, UN-Agencies, international institutes and experts has pointed out the lack of attention to the spatial aspects as part of the monitoring such as the location, size and physical development of slum settlements. The purpose of this expert meeting was to assess the one or two most promising methods for slum mapping using VHRSI, for further development and evaluation through field testing. Ultimately the most successful methods will form the basis of training and capacity building materials that will be developed and directed to staff of local governments, NGO and others engaged in digital slum mapping and urban poverty reduction programmes around the globe.

A visit to CASA

2008-05-26T14:06:00.001-07:00

Meeting new and old colleagues after the presentation Slum detection through lacunarity-based texture analysis of remote sensing images in the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) at University College London (UCL) on 19 May 2008. From left to right: (front row) Andrews Cook, H. Serdar Kaya, (back row) Toofan Haghani, Sinésio Alves Júnior, Mauro Barros Filho, and Yi Gong.

Complexity analysis of textures from urban images applying fractal dimension

2007-11-29T10:11:00.000-08:00

In this paper, fractal dimensions based on the Bouligand-Minkowski and the Box-Counting 3D approaches were applied to estimate the complexity of textures from Google Earth’s images of São Carlos (SP), Brazil. Five pairs of urban images at different distances from the city center were selected. Figures 1 and 2 show the Bouligand-Minkowski and the Box-Counting 3D signatures, respectively. As we can see, the curves' behaviour of the latter can better distinguish the selected images than the former.

Fig.1: Bouligand-Minkowski Signature of the selected images

Fig.2: Box-Counting 3D signature of the selected images

The results show that as the distance to the city center increases, the higher the fractal dimension of the selected image is, and the more complex and chaotic the urban morphology is. This suggests that São Carlos presents a clear core-periphery structure.

For more details about these results see the short paper: Análise da complexidade de texturas em imagens urbanas utilizando dimensão fractal which was presented at IX Brasilian Symposium in Geoinformatics GEOINFO 2007 , in Campos do Jordão, Brazil.

A morfologia da habitabilidade intra-urbana: o uso de imagem CBERS-2 na análise de padrões morfológicos do Recife

2007-09-01T14:27:00.000-07:00

Nowadays, the significative improvements of remote sensing images have offered a better representation of intra-urban morphological patterns. However, high spatial resolution images have a great number of spectral noise, difficulting the discrimination of image objects. The analysis of image textural information is an alternative to minimize this problem. In this context, this paper verifies the capabilities of CBERS-2 imagens on the differentiation of morphological patterns between areas with different inhabitability conditions. Initially, the spectral information of a CBERS-2 image are enhanced and classified into two groups: occupied and non-occupied spaces. Then, the textural information of the binary classified image are calculated through a sliding box algorithm. Finally, the lacunarity values obtained are compared with values of a Inhabitability Index (IH) created from Census 2000 variables. The results show that, in general, non-occupied spaces are bettter distributed in urban areas with higher inhabitability conditions.

For more information see the paper: A morfologia da habitabilidade intra-urbana: o uso de imagem CBERS-2 na análise de padrões morfológicos no Recife which was presented at XIII Brasilian Remote Sensing Symposium SBSR 2007 , in Florianópolis, Brazil.

Analysing spatial pattern in slums: a multiscale approach

2007-08-29T06:11:00.000-07:00

According to the Global Report on Human Settlements (United Nations, 2003), almost 1 billion people (32% of world population) live in squatter settlements or slums. Recently, the perspective over those settlements has changed, from harmful tumours which would spread around sickly and unhealthy cities, to a new perspective that interpret them as social expressions of a more complex urban dynamics. In this context, Cities can be interpreted from the perspective of urban texture through high resolution satellite images. Preliminary results from analytical experiments based on Lacunarity suggest that it is not only possible to distinguish the spatial configuration of slums from formal areas, but from other informal areas as well, contributing for the development of alternative and complementary classifications of these settlements. For more information see the paper: Analysing spatial pattern in slums: a multiscale approach presented at Congresso Luso-Brasileiro para o Planejamento Urbano, Regional, Integrado e Sustentável (PLURIS)in 2005.

Urban textures: a multiscale analysis of sociospatial patterns

2007-08-28T06:31:00.000-07:00

This paper proposes a multiscale method based on the concept of lacunarity to recognize and classify textures of remote sensing images from urban areas with different inhabitability conditions. Experiments were done with several fragments of Recife (northeast of Brazil) intra-urban tissue. The results suggest that it is possible to describe and distinguish spatial patterns through its textures, and that there is a strong correlation between its morphological and social patterns.

Lacunarity curves from 30 QuickBird satellite images of Recife, Brazil from urban areas with high (green curves on the graph) and low (red curves on the graph) inhabitability. For more information, see the paper: urban texture: a multiscale analysis of sociospatial patterns which was presented at 10th International Conference on Computers in Urban Planning and Urban Management CUPUM 2007 .

Fractal dimension applied on satellite images of urban areas

2007-08-28T05:52:00.000-07:00

Dendogram generated from satellite images observed at 15.000 feets in high from São Carlos (SP), Brazil. The results show that the images are hierarchically clustered according to the distance from the city centre (Backes et al, 2007).

PhD Thesis Examination November 2006

2007-08-28T04:17:00.000-07:00

From left to right: Ana Lúcia Candeias, Mauro Barros Filho, Norma Lacerda, Luiz Amorim, Jan Bitoun, and Fabiano Sobreira.

Ordinary Kriging applied to spatial analysis of intra-urban inhabitability

2007-08-28T02:08:00.000-07:00

Intra-urban inhabitability is a wide concept which is related to not only the dwelling quality per si, but also to the quality of its surrounding. When an intra-urban inhabitability analysis explicitly considers the spatial arrangement of the avalailable data, it is possible to obtain more significant results than those obtained with techniques which consider the observational units as independent samples. Ordinary Kriging is a geostatistic interpolation method which is considered as the best linear unbiased estimator due to its capability to access the incertatinty degree in the estimation of non-sampled values, to minimize the error variance, and to permit the identification of the more appropriated neighbourhood and weights for the inferential procedure. This paper aims to access the results obtained from the application of the Ordinary Kriging method in the spatial analysis of intra-urban inhabitability of the city of Recife (Brazil). Firstly, it was created inhabitability indexes from Demographic Census 2000 data. Then, it was done an exploratory analysis of these indexes. Finally, it was definied an anisotropic semivariogram model to measure and map the inhabilitability spatial autocorrelation in Recife. The results reveal the principal spatial trends and clusters in the city.

Surface generated through interpolation by Ordinary Kriging of an Inhabitability Index (IH) created from Census 2000 data of Recife, Brazil . The darker the green areas, the higher the IH values. The darker the red areas, the lower the IH values.