Disaggregating Job Seekers Allowance Satistics for Belfast using IKONOS Satellite Imagery

This paper presents a dasymetric map produced for Belfast, the capital city of Northern Ireland. The map was generated by integrating IKONOS satellite imagery from May 2003 with Output Areas from the 2001 Census. Urban areas are dynamic entities formed by the social processes and interactions of the urban population. The intricate patterns that exist within urban areas are largely hidden by the aggregation of statistics to larger areal units. Dasymetric mapping has been used widely to interpolate statistics from a set of source zones to a set of target zones. The provision of high-resolution satellite imagery enables the detection of smaller target zones that were previously hidden due to the coarse resolution of satellite imagery. The following dasymetric map identifies the ability of IKONOS data to distinguish between built land and non-built land within administrative units. The result is that population statistics can be interpolated more accurately to areas that are most likely to have a resident population