UNRAVELLING HOMOGENEITY: ONE PREDOMINANT LAND COVER ELEMENT WITH CONSTRAINED POTENTIAL FOR MIXTURE

Familiar land use classifications can delineate urban areas into homogeneous patches labeled as residential, commercial, and industrial, for example. Those patches are each identified for a particular use; however, within a single use class, the patches may differ tremendously in terms of actual cover. For example, some residential neighborhoods may have tree-lined streets and yards while others may be densely built and lack trees. Despite this variation in the physical cover of the land, all of these areas would be considered residential. Viewing all of those patches as homogeneously residential misses the opportunity to recognize and work with the heterogeneity