Assessing the applicability of the V–I–S model to map urban land use in the developing world: Case study of Yogyakarta, Indonesia Hery Setiawan a , Renaud Mathieu a, * , Michelle Thompson-Fawcett b a School of Surveying, University of Otago, P.O. Box 56, Dunedin, New Zealand b Department of Geography, University of Otago, P.O. Box 56, Dunedin, New Zealand Received 16 June 2004; accepted in revised form 17 April 2005 Abstract The extensive expansion of urban centres over agricultural land in Indonesia is poorly mon- itored due to the ill-equipped land monitoring system. The objective of this study was to assess the applicability of the vegetation–impervious surface–soil (V–I–S) model in classifying land use in the context of medium-sized and densely populated cities of developing countries. The V–I–S model describes the urban environment as a linear combination of vegetation, impervious surface and soil. As such, it is well suited to relate remotely sensed data, which are closely related to land cover, to biophysical aspects of urbanising environments. A Landsat-5 Thematic Mapper image acquired in June 1994 (dry season) was used to dem- onstrate the usefulness of the V–I–S model to map urban land use of Yogyakarta, Indonesia. The V–I–S model was applied in a hierarchical classification scheme, in which each level of the hierarchy was designed to segment one or more land use classes considering each component of the V–I–S model. The performance of this approach was evaluated by comparison to a standard maximum likelihood classification. Official land use maps produced in 1994 were used to validate both classifications. 0198-9715/$ - see front matter Ó 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.compenvurbsys.2005.04.003 * Corresponding author. Fax: +64 3 479 7586. E-mail addresses: setiawan_h2002@yahoo.com.au (H. Setiawan), renaud.mathieu@stonebow.otago. ac.nz (R. Mathieu), mtf@geography.otago.ac.nz (M. Thompson-Fawcett). Computers, Environment and Urban Systems 30 (2006) 503–522 www.elsevier.com/locate/compenvurbsys