Francesco Nattino
Francesco is a Senior Research Software Engineer at the Netherlands eScience Center, the Dutch national center of expertise for software in academic research. In his position, he collaborates with researchers on topics related to Environment and Sustainability, combining experience in data handling and HPC with a more recently developed passion for geospatial applications.
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.