Claudiu Forgaci
I am an assistant professor of urban design and analytics at TU Delft, passionate about asking spatial and non-spatial questions, mostly with R. As co-coordinator of spatial data and GIS education in the Department of Urbanism, I am engaged in building our students capacity, skills and knowledge for evidence-based spatial design and planning. I co-initiated Rbanism, a community of R users that aims to empower urbanism researchers, students, educators and practitioners to use open-source software and related open-science practices effectively and with confidence. Currently, I focus on developing an open-source tool for urban river space delineation.
Sessions
Urban transformations that aim to build greener, more sustainable, and climate-resilient cities very often target interventions around rivers and waterways.
Designing and planning these transformations requires boundaries to be drawn for the urban areas surrounding rivers. Ideally, this process would capture the socio-ecological specificities and complexities of riverside urban areas. Instead, spatial units are often drawn arbitrarily or relying on administrative sub-units that often use waterways as delimiting element – not as their center.
To tackle these challenges, we are developing the City River Spaces (CRiSp) open-source software. CRiSp derives spatial morphological units that delineate and segment urban river corridors from digital terrain data as well as infrastructure datasets, such as street and railway networks. CRiSp geospatial data and (spatial) network analysis steps are generic in nature and could thus be applied in other sub-domains of the geosciences as well.
With CRiSp, we aim to support a growing interdisciplinary research community concerned with understanding and transforming urban river spaces, and thereby enable new research avenues, such as integrated local spatial analyses and global cross-case analyses.