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 support of providing consistent global information for the SDG indicator 11.1.1 “proportion of urban population living in slums, informal settlements or inadequate housing”. At the technical level, we compare several EO-based methods and imagery for mapping deprived living conditions, discussing their ability to map such areas including differences in terms of accuracy and performance at the city scale. At the operational level, we compare available municipal maps showing identified deprived areas with the spatial extent of morphological mapped areas of deprived living conditions (using EO) at the city scale, discussing the reasons for inconsistencies between municipal and EO-based maps. We provide an outlook on how EO-based mapping of deprived living conditions could contribute to a global spatial information base to support targeting of deprived living conditions in support of the SDG Goal 11.1.1 indicator, when uncertainties and ethical considerations on data provision are well addressed.

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 analysis of LST which has limited support for the understanding of how LST varies with the advancing of urbanization. This paper presents a workflow to extract the spatio-temporal pattern of LST through time series clustering by focusing on the LST of Wuhan, China, from 2002 to 2017 with a 3-year time interval with 8-day MODerate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) satellite image products. The Latent pattern of LST (LLST) generated by non-parametric Multi-Task Gaussian Process Modeling (MTGP) and the Multi-Scale Shape Index (MSSI) which characterizes the morphology of LLST are coupled for pattern recognition. Specifically, spatio-temporal patterns are discovered after the extraction of spatial patterns conducted by the incorporation of $k$ -means and the Back-Propagation neural networks (BP-Net). The spatial patterns of the 6 years form a basic understanding about the corresponding temporal variances. For spatio-temporal pattern recognition, LLSTs and MSSIs of the 6 years are regarded as geo-referenced time series. Multiple algorithms including traditional $k$ -means with Euclidean Distance (ED), shape-based $k$ -means with the constrained Dynamic Time Warping ( $c$ DTW) distance measure, and the Dynamic Time Warping Barycenter Averaging (DBA) centroid computation method ( $k$ - $c$ DBA) and $k$ -shape are applied. Ten external indexes are employed to evaluate the performance of the three algorithms and reveal $k$ - $c$ DBA as the optimal time series clustering algorithm for our study. The study area is divided into 17 geographical time series clusters which respectively illustrate heterogeneous temporal dynamics of LST patterns. The homogeneous geographical clusters correspond to the zoning custom of urban planning and design, and thus, may efficiently bridge the urban and environmental systems in terms of research scope and scale. The proposed workflow can be utilized for other cities and potentially used for comparison among different cities.