ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
Satellite mapping of urban built-up heights reveals extreme infrastructure gaps and inequalities in the Global South.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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15 citing papers in PubMed, 136 citations in OpenAlex.
- Urban spatial dynamic modeling in transition: Hybrid, human-centric, and scalable futures.Ambio · 2026Article
- China's carbon emission trading and income inequality: evidence from factor substitution.Carbon balance and management · 2026Article
- Government policy documents across 185 countries largely cite Global North sources.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Patterns, drivers, and trends of urban cooling demand across global cities.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Global increases in built-up volume indicate more divergent and less dispersed urban expansion patterns.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Satellite mapping of every building's function in urban China reveals deep built environment disparities.Nature communications · 2026Article
- High Spatial Resolution Building Characteristics for the Global South: Insights from the Google Open Buildings Temporal Dataset (2016-2023).Gates open research · 2026Article
- FU3D: the first global projections of future urban three-dimensional (3D) expansion for the 21st century under shared socioeconomic pathways.Scientific data · 2025Article
- Mapping the mismatch between building and population growth: A global study of 1,700 cities.iScience · 2025Article
- Narrowing the gap for city building height predictions.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Inequality in infrastructure access and its association with health disparities.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- Weighing the global built environment: High-resolution mapping and quantification of material stocks in buildings.Journal of industrial ecology · 2025Article
- A global product of 150-m urban building height based on spaceborne lidar.Scientific data · 2024Article
- Article
- Unveiling patterns in human dominated landscapes through mapping the mass of US built structures.Nature communications · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 4 institutions in 2 countries.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Information on urban built-up infrastructure is essential to understand the role of cities in shaping environmental, economic, and social outcomes. The lack of data on built-up heights over large areas has limited our ability to characterize urban infrastructure and its spatial variations across the world. Here, we developed a global atlas of urban built-up heights circa 2015 at 500-m resolution from the Sentinel-1 Ground Range Detected satellite data. Results show extreme gaps in per capita urban built-up infrastructure in the Global South compared with the global average, and even larger gaps compared with the average levels in the Global North. Per capita urban built-up infrastructures in some countries in the Global North are more than 30 times higher than those in the Global South. The results also show that the built-up infrastructure in 45 countries in the Global North combined, with ∼16% of the global population, is roughly equivalent to that of 114 countries in the Global South, with ∼74% of the global population. The inequality in urban built-up infrastructure, as measured by an inequality index, is large in most countries, but the largest in the Global South compared with the Global North. Our analysis reveals the scale of infrastructure demand in the Global South that is required in order to meet sustainable development goals.
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