Section: New Results

A method for downscaling open population data

To extend our ongoing work on urban sprawl indicators (see above), we have developed a method to perform dissagregated population estimations at building level using open data. Our goal is to estimate the number of people living at the fine level of individual households by using open urban data and coarse-scaled population data. First, a fine scale description of residential land use per building is built using OpenStreetMap. Then, using coarse-scale gridded population data, we perform the down-scaling for each household given their containing area for residential usage. We rely solely on open data in order to ensure replicability, and to be able to apply our method to any city in the world, as long as sufficient data exists. The evaluation is carried out using fine-grained census block data for cities in France as ground-truth.

This work is published in [11] and the associated software implementation is made available as open source code at https://github.com/lgervasoni/urbansprawl.