James Hale and Jon Sadler of Birmingham University explain the development of a new method of mapping the night-time lightscapes of entire city areas in a photometrically accurate visual form. Artificial lighting and urbanisation go hand in hand. The relationship is so close that recent research has shown that remote measurements of artificial lighting from the air can be closely mapped on to urban areas, urban populations, electric power consumption, density of built infrastructure and economic activity. As part of the Urban Futures project, researchers in the School of Geography at the University of Birmingham have been exploring the potential for developing lighting datasets to identify such relationships at a city-wide scale. In this paper we report on the dataset for the City of Birmingham (UK), outline its development and illustrate some initial patterns and possible future applications.
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