Mahatma Education Society is jointly developing a research center called Urban Expansion Observatory in conjunction with New York University Stern School of Business. The work that will be conducted here aims to measure the quality of expansion in urban areas from 1990 - 2010 using high-resolution imagery. The Observatory is being established to undertake the digitization of high resolution satellite imagery, in order to measure the quality of urban expansion in the fringe areas of 200 global cities from 1990 - 2010. The outputs from the digitization will be analyzed to obtain various urban indicators. The outputs from the analysis will be presented in 2016 at the United Nations Habitat III Conference.