ποΈShenzhen 2009: SPOT5 Historical Satellite Imagery
Shenzhen went from a fishing town to a city of more than ten million people in under thirty years. 2009 catches a telling moment: the Second Line still separated the special economic zone from the rest of the city, Futian and Luohu were already dense with towers, Nanshan was still reclaiming land, factories ran edge to edge across Bao'an and Longhua, and most of Qianhai was still mudflat and empty ground. A satellite image from that year fixes the boundary between βbeforeβ and βafterβ the big expansion: where the built-up edge sat, how far the port had been filled, how industrial parks spread, and where the remaining farmland and lychee orchards still were.
At 10 m, SPOT5 cannot pick out a single house, but it is more than enough to read street blocks, main roads, factory rows, port yards and large construction sites β ideal for decade-scale comparisons. For planning, industrial studies, shoreline analysis and map collectors, this is a cheap and reliable base layer. The images below were taken by the French SPOT5 satellite over Shenzhen in 2009 at 10 m resolution.
SPOT5 is an optical remote-sensing satellite developed by France's CNES with Belgium and Sweden. It was launched on 4 May 2002 on an Ariane 4 rocket, continuing the SPOT series. Two high-resolution geometric (HRG) instruments deliver 2.5 m panchromatic and 10 m multispectral imagery over a 60 km swath, with along-track stereo and fast revisit through side-looking. SPOT5 worked until 2015 and left a long global archive; it was one of the most widely used medium-resolution commercial sources of the 2000s and early 2010s.
SPOT5 suits the study of Shenzhen particularly well. A 10 m pixel is roughly a basketball court, so individual buildings blur, but block outlines, arterial roads, factory rows, port yards and large construction sites read reliably. Overlay 2009 on today's imagery and you can watch Qianhai, Longhua and Guangming turn from open ground into city, and see the shoreline advance through reclamation as the airport and port expanded. For urban growth monitoring, land-use change, shoreline evolution and plan evaluation, the SPOT5 archive is a time-consistent and affordable base.
π Ground Detail: SPOT5 vs. Today (shorter bar = finer detail)
One pixel, three sensorsποΈShenzhen in 2009: Historical SPOT5 Imagery
Total 15 imagesClick the βΆ button in the middle of any image to view it full screen. In full screen, press β β for the previous image and β β for the next; press Esc to exit.
Sample
Sample
Sample
Sample
Sample
Sample
Sample
Sample
Sample
Sample
Sample
Sample
Sample
Sample
Sample
π―What Else Can You Spot?
These ground targets read clearly in SPOT5 imagery. Pick a topic to see more.