Assessing the impact of unplanned settlements on urban renewal projects with GEE

Abstract

Spatial plans and strategies ensure that urbanization takes place according to predetermined scientific and technical criteria. Urbanization that takes place without taking into account these legal and technical bases lead to the emergence of informal, risky and dysfunctional settlements. Over time, these settlements become increasingly vulnerable due to their failure to meet social and technical requirements, making their sustainability increasingly challenging, and inevitably becoming subjects of urban renewal activities. Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform's archive of satellite images provides temporal monitoring of urbanization on Earth for about 50 years and analysis of changes in the cloud environment. This study investigates whether the GEE platform can use to detect the impact of the areas where settlement activities are carried out without a development plan in the current urban transformation projects in Istanbul. Land use/cover maps classified with the Random Forest algorithm correlate urbanization activities in urban renewal areas with the entry into force date of the spatial plans that guide the settlement. The classification results evaluated in conjunction with statistical tests and spatial plan decisions demonstrate that unplanned urbanization is a serious obstacle to the sustainability of settlements. Additionally, the study results show the performance of the GEE platform in detecting the effects of factors in the urbanization period. The GEE platform can serve as a facilitative tool for deriving lessons from urbanization experiences to inform policymaking.