MOTIVATIONS FOR CHARACTERIZING THE HYBRID, SOCIAL-ECOLOGICAL CITY

There are many reasons to be intrigued by cities, and to generate new ways to portray cities, and indeed any kind of urban area. We are motivated by the nature and importance of cities themselves, by their hybrid urban structure, their obvious and changing spatial patchiness, and by the opportunity we saw to develop and employ a novel land cover classification that could serve both urban science and urban design, as well as other scholarly and practical disciplines working in the urban realm. We hope the novelty of the way we model and depict urban land cover can benefit regional