Report of the Expert Group Meeting on Slum Identification and Mapping

 From 21-23 May 2008 a group of 21 international experts on remote sensing and slum
monitoring met at the International Institute for Geoinformation Science and Earth
Observation (ITC), The Netherlands (see appendix A for details of participants and the
programme of the meeting). The focus of the meeting was to document methods for
the identification and delineation of slum areas based on very high resolution (VHR)
remote sensing and supplementary data sets (e.g. census and related GIS data on
infrastructure and services). A major goal was to explore the potential of satellite
imagery to assist the UN-HABITAT Global Urban Observatory (GUO) in producing
global statistics on slums in support of Millennium Development Goal 7, Target 11,
“improving the lives of 100 million slum dwellers”.

The main purpose of the meeting was to:
1. establish requirements for slum mapping for the Global Urban Observatory
(GUO) of UN-HABITAT;
2. present state of the art methods using VHR imagery for slum mapping;
3. identify suitable methods for further development, knowledge transfer, and
capacity building.