Mapping Global Cities: GIS Methods in Urban Analysis

Spatial thinking and analysis are essential for intelligent urban policymaking in a globally connected world. Urban planners need to understand how cities are organized and how residential patterns are shaped as a result of population and employment changes. Otherwise, they risk designing urban plans and policies that are unrealistic and exclusionary. Geographic information systems (GIS) can be usefully applied by planners to new urban development challenges in global metropolitan regions and megacities, particularly those where rapid demographic changes, including immigration, have spurred massive growth.

Mapping Global Cities: GIS Methods in Urban Analysis shows how the analysis of relevant data with GIS can provide a powerful new perspective in addressing urban research and policy questions, and it enhances our understanding and efforts in solving urban planning problems. Author Ayse Pamuk draws upon her extensive fieldwork experience in developing countries, over ten years of work as a university professor, and extends it in new ways by using the power of spatial analysis with GIS.

Part I of the book shows how analysts use GIS to explore global metropolitan regions, and provides an overview of spatial data used in GIS analysis. Part II shows how urban planners and policy makers use GIS, emphasizing the issues of local government and social service delivery. Part III shows how researchers use GIS to analyze spatial patterns in metropolitan areas, including locating immigrant clusters with census data and comparing immigrant clustering patterns across metropolitan areas. The book’s accompanying CD contains data and printable, step-by-step GIS exercises, including a self-directed project, that enable students and users to make maps and explore themes covered in the chapters.

Mapping Global Cities is an invaluable resource for urban studies and planning students, international development professionals, human settlement experts in the developing world, urban planning practitioners, as well as researchers and scholars concerned with housing and human settlements policy analysis.

Software Requirements ArcView®, ArcEditor™, or ArcInfo® 9 and the ArcGIS® Spatial Analyst extension are required to complete the exercises contained on the book’s CD. Earlier software releases are not compatible. The CD-ROM included with this book contains the data used in the exercises.

About the author:

Ayse Pamuk is an associate professor of urban studies at San Francisco State University and a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley’s Institute of Urban and Regional Development. Her expertise is in housing and urban policy, international planning, and research methods. She has taught graduate and undergraduate courses for urban planning students at the University of Virginia. She holds PhD and MCP degrees in city and regional planning from UC Berkeley. Her professional practice includes consulting assignments with The World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank. She has advised governments of Brazil, Turkey, and Trinidad and Tobago on low-income housing policy. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a National Science Foundation grant to integrate GIS into social science research methods curricula. Her research-based articles have been published in leading urban studies and urban planning journals, including International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Urban Studies, Habitat International, and Journal of Planning Education and Research. She lives in San Francisco, California.