Jon Wang

• Doctor of Philosophy
• University of Twente

Earth Observation (EO)-based mapping of cities has great potential to detect patterns beyond the physical ones. However, EO combined with the surge of machine learning techniques to map non-physical, such as socioeconomic, aspects directly, goes to the expense of reproducibility and interpretability, hence scientific validity. In this paper, we sug...

The use of geospatially dependent information, which has been stipulated as a law in geography, to model geographic patterns forms the cornerstone of geostatistics, and has been inherited in many data science based techniques as well, such as statistical learning algorithms. Still, we observe hesitations in interpreting geographic dependency scient...

The urban form is a foundational element in urban analytics, planning, and design. However, systematic and consistent depiction of urban form is challenging due to the complexity of urban elements and the variety of scales involved. This paper formalizes the concept of 'urban pattern language' as a multi-scalar analytical approach to decode such co...

Master plans are pivotal in strategising urban development, dictating land use, building height, and development intensity. These plans influence the spatial arrangement of urban infrastructure and activities, shaping the morphological and dynamic urban spatial structure. This study evaluates Singapore’s master plan’s effect on urban spatial struct...

Urban morphology profoundly influences city planning and experiences significant transformations as cities evolve. This paper investigates paradigm shifts in block-level planning through a case study of Singapore, a city celebrated for its precision in urban planning and swift transformation. Integrating urban morphology theories with empirical dat...

Streets are a crucial part of the built environment, and their layouts, the street patterns, are widely researched and contribute to a quantitative understanding of urban morphology. However, traditional street pattern analysis only considers a few broadly defined characteristics. It uses administrative boundaries and grids as units of analysis tha...

Street patterns are planar street layouts in a given urban area, which serve as tools for researchers and urban planners to comprehend the structure of urban environments. Nonetheless, the task of mapping street patterns for extensive inter-city studies remains daunting due to the lack of consistency in manual identification methods. With recent te...

The mapping and characterisation of building footprints is a challenging task due to inaccessibility and incompleteness of the required data, thus hindering the estimation of loss caused by natural and anthropogenic hazards. Major advancements have been made in the collaborative mapping of buildings with platforms like OpenStreetMap, however, many...

Urbanization processes are manifested by the change in the physical morphology of cities. Gaining knowledge about cities through their morphology is naturally linked to the capability of remote sensing (RS) that can monitor city forms with a synoptic view. Yet, our knowledge of the urban form does not linearly increase with the increase of image da...

Most earth observation (EO) approaches only yield a binary delineation of deprived/non-deprived areas – an oversimplified characterisation with little information inferred regarding the diversity of intra-urban deprivation. In this study, we attempt to explore the potential of using VHR EO-based data to predict the degrees of intra-urban deprivatio...

In the past two decades, Earth observation (EO) data have been utilized for studying the spatial patterns of urban deprivation. Given the scope of many existing studies, it is still unclear how very-high-resolution EO data can help to improve our understanding of the multidimensionality of deprivation within settlements on a city-wide scale. In thi...

Urban development has significantly modified the surface thermal environment in urban areas. This study provides the first attempt to characterize the urban development imprint on surface thermal environment for 323 cities across the entire country of China, using an intra-urban perspective. Specifically, it investigates the variation of surface th...

Due to the lim­i­ta­tion in the avail­abil­ity of air­borne im­agery data that are high in both spa­tial and tem­po­ral res­o­lu­tion, land sur­face tem­per­a­ture (LST) dense in both space and time can only be ob­tained through down­scal­ing of fre­quently ac­quired LST with coarse res­o­lu­tion. Many con­ven­tional down­scal­ing tech­niques are o...

Spatial point tracks are of concern for an increasing number of analysts studying spatial behaviour patterns and environmental effects. Take an epidemiologist studying the behavior of cyclists and how their health is affected by the city's air quality. The accuracy of such analyses critically depends on the positional accuracy of the tracked points...

Machine learning techniques have been frequently applied to map urban deprivation (commonly referred to as slums) in very high-resolution satellite images. Among these, Deep Convolutional Neural Networks have shown exceptional efficiency in automated deprivation mapping at the local scale. Yet these networks have never been used to map very small h...

The continuous increase in deprived living conditions in many cities of the Global South contradicts efforts to make cities inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable places. Using examples of Asian, African, and Latin American cities, this study shows the scope and limits of earth observation (EO)-based mapping of deprived living conditions in su...

GIF animation of diurnal LST dynamics of metropolitan Wuhan, China

Satellite images allow characterizing and monitoring urban slums. Yet the urban landscape as a complex geographic system is composed of hierarchical patterns and discrete objects in a spatial and temporal continuum with different scales and anisotropy which can only be estimated from image snapshots. Understanding the spatial heterogeneity of slums...

Heat exposure has become a global threat to human health and life with increasing temperatures and frequency of extreme heat events. Considering risk as a function of both heat vulnerability and hazard intensity, this study examines whether poor urban dwellers residing in slums are exposed to higher temperature, adding to their vulnerable demograph...

Land Surface Temperature (LST) is a critical component to understand the impact of urbanization on the urban thermal environment. Previous studies were inclined to apply only one snapshot to analyze the pattern and dynamics of LST without considering the non-stationarity in the temporal domain, or focus on the diurnal, seasonal, and annual pattern...

Inefficient mitigation of excessive heat is attributed to the discrepancy between the scope of climate research and conventional planning practice. This study approaches this problem at both domains. Generally, the study, on one hand, claims that the climate research of the temperature phenomenon should be at local scale, where implementation of pl...

Current characterization of the Land Surface Temperature (LST) at city scale insufficiently supports efficient mitigations and adaptations of the Surface Urban Heat Island (SUHI) at local scale. This research intends to delineate the LST variation at local scale where mitigations and adaptations are more feasible. At the local scale, the research h...

Current characterization of the Urban Heat Island (UHI) remains insufficient to support the effective mitigation and adaptation of increasing temperatures in urban areas. Planning and design strategies are restricted to the investigation of temperature anomalies at a city scale. By focusing on Land Surface Temperature ofWuhan, China, this research...

The Koppen Climate Classification system is one of the examples dissecting global climate process into uniform zones. Due to the fractal structure of geographic phenomenon, the classification of climate zones may be applied at different scales to promote further understanding of climate system at the human-environment interface. This research prese...