The purpose of this project is triple.
First, improving the knowledge of the distribution of building types for 18 countries where
more detailed information (e.g. census or other sources) than that previously gathered became
available. It includes the definition of sub-national distributions of building types, replacing
one single distribution for the whole country. Countries selected include the largest
heterogeneous ones (China, India and Indonesia) and represent about half the world
population.
Second, attempting to solve the enumerating problem of population living and working in the
different types of buildings identified in the first task, based on published occupancy rates.
Third, the validation of the method applied in 10 cities by the Kokusai Kogyo team to identify
homogeneous building types by polygons from satellite imagery and web-photos. We
compare their results for Bogota, Santiago and Istanbul with ours where we collected census
data at the district level. The identification of the main building type by homogeneous
polygons reveals to be a first and limited approximation of the information from census data
at similar scale. The approach proposed by the Kokusai group could be combined with the
one proposed by WAPMERR.