Monitoring Beijing inner city transformation from 1966 to 2010

This paper is concerned with monitoring morphological changes in the Beijing inner city using remote sensing. The Beijing inner city contains a huge urban heritage composed of traditional courtyards (shiheyuans) and alleys (hutongs). Since the economic reform in 1978, Beijing as most of Chinese cities experiences a fast urbanization process and has to deal with the pressure of the real estate industry and historic preservation. Based on remote sensing images, we have developed a change detection method able to identify the construction of new high-rise buildings to the expense of the old districts. The results highlight the surface area of high-rise buildings has increased from 18% of Beijing inner city to 60% between 1966 and 2010. This study brings out both methodological and thematic interests: the efficiency of the proposed remote sensing approach to process heterogeneous remote sensing images and the Beijing urban transformation to the expense of the old districts.