Foreword to the Special Issue “Exploring the Potential of Urban Remote Sensing”

Urban growth and decline, changing urban patterns, densification, conversion, or deconstruction of the built landscape, gain, loss or alteration of natural space, socioeconomic inequalities, variabilities of structural types within and across cities, efficiency of land consumption, causes and effects of the urban heat island, environmental burdens of air pollution, impacts of natural hazards on urban assets and people, or projected effects of climate change; these manifold and crucial topics in the urban domain are all issues in a long list that could be continued almost indefinitely. All these and many other issues are omnipresent in today's cities on our planet.