EOC Geoservice Building Footprints – Informal Settlements

Building Footprints – Informal Settlements – Globally distributed, 2002-2017

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All Themes

Anthroposphere

DLR

EOC

building footprints

building morphology

manual visual image interpretation

poverty areas

complex urban areas

opendata

This geospatial dataset provides manually mapped building footprints for poverty and informal settlement areas across multiple cities worldwide.

The polygons were created by manual visual image interpretation (MVII) from very high-resolution satellite imagery and support urban morphology, deprivation, and remote sensing research.

References:

Kraff, N.J., Wurm, M., Friesen, J., Debray, H., Taubenböck, H. (2026): A manually interpreted geo-dataset of building footprints in complex urban poverty areas across the globe. Sci Data DOI: 10.1038/s41597-026-07945-2

Taubenböck, H., Kraff, N. J., & Wurm, M. (2018): The morphology of the Arrival City - A global categorization based on literature surveys and remotely sensed data. Applied Geography, 92, 150-167. DOI: 10.1016/j.apgeog.2018.02.002

Taubenböck, H., & Kraff, N. J. (2014). The physical face of slums: A structural comparison of slums in Mumbai, India, based on remotely sensed data. Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, 29(1), 15-38. DOI: 10.1007/s10901-013-9333-x

Kraff, N. J., Wurm, M., & Taubenböck, H. (2020). The dynamics of poor urban areas - analyzing morphologic transformations across the globe using Earth observation data. Cities, 107, 102905. DOI: 10.1016/j.cities.2020.102905

Kraff, N. J., Wurm, M., & Taubenböck, H. (2020). Uncertainties of human perception in visual image interpretation in complex urban environments. IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing, 13, 4229-4241. DOI: 10.1109/JSTARS.2020.3011543