Building Footprint Data from Earth Observation Contribute to Sustainable City Planning: A Perspective

City planning and optimal land use design are becoming challenges considering environmental sustainability, urban growth, and citizen science. Earth observation data sources contribute significantly to preparing accurate man-made infrastructure like buildings and their varieties in addressing such challenges. However, despite the efforts in designing and managing urban buildings from Earth Observation datasets, there is a clear gap in knowledge in developing the spatial ecosystem of existing urban building management. This paper draws a perspective by developing analytics on representative urban building footprint datasets with a focus on data quality issues. Issues such as the off-nadir imagery, omission/commission errors, and positional accuracy are considered. These datasets are generated by the community for the public good and by the industry sectors for commercial benefits. This perspective and the proposed spatial ecosystem ultimately help in developing an operational framework for urban infrastructure in sustainable city planning.