Total: 1
Urban villages are areas filled with rural-like improvised structures in Chinese cities, usually housing the most vulnerable groups. Under the guidance of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Chinese government initiated renewal and redevelopment projects, underscoring the meticulous mapping and segmentation of urban villages. Satellite imagery is advanced and efficient in identifying urban villages and monitoring changes, but traditional methods neglect the morphological diversity in season, shape, size, spacing, and layout of urban villages, which is not satisfying for long-term wide-range data. Here, we design a targeted approach based on Tobler’s First Law of Geography, using curriculum labeling to solve morphological diversity and semi-automatically generate segmentation for urban village boundaries. Specifically, we use manually labeled data as seeds for pre-trained SegFormer models and incrementally fine-tune the model based on geographical proximity. The rigorous experimentation across five diverse cities substantiates the commendable efficacy of our methodology. IoU metric demonstrates a noteworthy improvement of over 119% to baseline. Our final results cover 265,050 urban villages across 433 cities in China over the past 10 years, and the analysis reveals the uneven redevelopment by geography and city scale. We further examine the within-city distribution and verify the urban scaling law associated with several socio-economic factors. Our method can be used nationwide to decide redevelopment priority and resource tilt, contributing to SDG 11.1 on affordable housing and upgrading slums. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/LtCUV.