This article describes the outcomes of an international workshop on urban remote sensing. The workshop synthesized the needs of remote sensing scientists to better monitor and analyse urban physical and social dynamics. The workshop was held with urban land use forecasting workshop in April 2011 in Arizona. The four major themes of the jointly held workshops were application, data, scale and case studies. Application refers to how data are used to address urban problems. Data refers to the sources and types of raw data available. Scale is the ever-present concern over data reduction and resolution. Case studies examine a single urban area, typically based on one or two primary themes. One outcome was to integrate multiple case studies to form an urban typology. To respond to this need, this article integrates two case studies on the urban heat island in Atlanta, GA and Phoenix, AZ based on the four themes.