The Night Light Intrametropolitan Development Index applied to the Metropolitan Region of Campinas

Abstract

The metropolitan regions are an institutionalized form of regional organization by the State. They are also territories that form a complex urban system of land use and occupation. This paper intends to articulate the knowledge of urban geography, urban and regional planning, as well as remote sensing to improve an urban development index to the metropolitan policy. This index considers a methodology that uses the data of the demographic census of 2010 and satellite image grid of night light from the DMSP/OLS nighttime light data. The population of the census sectors and the satellite image grid were calculated for the cities of the Metropolitan Region of Campinas (RMC), according to the methodology of Night Light Development Index (NLDI). This works seeks to improve the NLDI methodology by adopting the weighting areas as a unit of territorial analysis. For each area, the new “Night Light Intrametropolitan Development Index” was calculated to deepen the empirical study of intra-urban space characteristics regarding the images of land use and occupation. The results show that the proposed index contributes to the evaluation and monitoring of the urban infrastructure of the metropolitan space and for an intrametropolitan regionalisation related to technical density.

Keywords:
Metropolitan Territorial Policy; Remote Sensing; Regionalization