Calling for Beta Pilot Workshops: Geospatial Data Carpentry for Urbanism

Researchers from the Department of Urbanism and members of the Digital Competence Centre at TU Delft have worked since 2023 on the curriculum Geospatial Data Carpentry for Urbanism, currently in The Carpentries Incubator.

This curriculum, inspired by the pre-existing Geospatial Data Carpentry, part of The Carpentries, was designed to introduce learners from the domain of urbanism to the use of R programming when analysing and visualising vector and raster data. It also introduces basic GIS operations using R. These skills are particularly relevant when working in the field of urbanism, but can be applied to other urbanism-related ones.

The team has successfully held two alpha workshops in February 2024 and February 2025 at TU Delft, and is now looking for community members and Instructors to host and teach beta pilot workshops with the revised curriculum in 2025 and 2026.

Lesson Profile

• Title: Geospatial Data Carpentry for Urbanism

• Lesson site: https://carpentries-incubator.github.io/r-geospatial-urban/

• Lesson repository: https://github.com/carpentries-incubator/r-geospatial-urban

• Teaching time: This lesson is designed to be delivered over two full days. Alternatively, its four modules can be taught across separate half days or a mix of one full day and two half days, as long as all sessions take place within the same week. This ensures learners can retain and build upon knowledge from previous modules.

Learning Objectives

After following the lesson, learners will be able to:

• Make use of the programming language R in the RStudio environment.

• Organise their data, scripts and outputs in a tidy way.

• Employ R functions and packages to load, transform and produce geospatial data.

• Produce maps with R, using raster and vector data.

• Perform basic GIS operations with R.

The lesson teaches skills in five areas:

1. Introduction to R programming (Lesson 1)

   1. Introduction to R and RStudio

   2. Data Structures

   3. Exploring Data Frames & Data Frame Manipulation with dplyr

   4. Introduction to visualisation

2. Introduction to Geospatial concepts (Lesson 2, part 1)

3. Analysing and visualising Vector data (Lesson 2, part 2)

   1. Open and Plot Vector Layers

   2. Explore and plot by vector layer attributes

   3. Plot multiple shapefiles

   4. Open and Plot Vector Layers

4. Analysing and visualising Raster data (Lesson 3)

   1. Explore and plot by vector layer attributes

   2. Plot multiple shapefiles

   3. Work with Multi-Band Rasters

5. Introduction to practical GIS operations using OpenStreetMap data (Lesson 4)

   1. Import and Visualise OSM Data

   2. Basic GIS operations with R and sf

Target Audience

The lesson is aimed at post-graduate students and early career researchers with little to no prior computational experience who would like to work in an efficient and reproducible manner with geospatial data, typically used in the urbanism domain, including but not limited to urban studies, urban geography, urban planning and design, and landscape architecture. It is also suitable for researchers who would like to transition from the use of proprietary software tools to using open-source tools in the analysis of geospatial data in urbanism.

State of Development

The lesson has been successfully tested by the development team in two workshops at TU Delft in February 2024 and February 2025.

How You Can Help Develop This Lesson

Please try teaching the lesson and let us know how it goes!

Our goal is to submit the lesson for adoption as a curriculum for official Geospatial Data Carpentry workshops. All feedback and suggestions for improvement that we receive from the community will help us achieve this goal.

If you are willing and able to teach the lesson to your community in a beta pilot workshop, please let us know by contacting rbanism@tudelft.nl. The lesson developers will be delighted to meet with you and answer any questions you have to help you prepare for the workshop.

After a pilot is complete, we ask Instructors and hosts to submit feedback based on their experience via our issue template. We would also be happy to meet with you again to debrief on your experience.

Acknowledgments

The development of the lesson has been possible due to the voluntary and collaborative effort of academic staff and PhD Candidates from the Department of Urbanism at TU Delft, members of the TU Delft Digital Competence Center (DCC), the Rbanism community and team members of 4TU.ResearchData. The developer team would like to express their sincere gratitude to TU Delft Library for supporting and facilitating this initiative, as well as to Ashley Cryan, who helped develop this lesson at an early stage.