Calling for Beta Pilot Workshops: Geospatial Data Carpentry for Urbanism

Since 2023, researchers from TU Delft’s Depart­ment of Urban­ism and the Dig­i­tal Com­pe­tence Cen­tre have devel­oped a new cur­ricu­lum, Geospa­tial Data Car­pen­try for Urban­ism, cur­rent­ly in The Car­pen­tries Incu­ba­tor. The devel­op­ers are look­ing for Car­pen­tries com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers and Instruc­tors will­ing to to host and teach beta pilot work­shops in 2025 and 2026.

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

This cur­ricu­lum, inspired by the pre-exist­ing Geospa­tial Data Car­pen­try, 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.

About the workshop

📚 Overview

• Pur­pose: Intro­duce learn­ers in urban­ism to R pro­gram­ming for analysing and visu­al­is­ing vec­tor and raster geospa­tial data, and per­form­ing basic GIS oper­a­tions using R.
• Struc­ture: 4 mod­ules deliv­ered over two full days (or equiv­a­lent half-day ses­sions with­in one week).
• Les­son site: carpentries-incubator.github.io/r‑geospatial-urban

🎯 Learning Objectives

• 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.

🧩 Lesson Content

1. Intro­duc­tion to R pro­gram­ming
2. Intro­duc­tion to Geospa­tial con­cepts
3. Analysing and visu­al­is­ing Vec­tor data
4. Analysing and visu­al­is­ing Raster data
5. Intro­duc­tion to prac­ti­cal GIS oper­a­tions using Open­StreetMap data

👥 Target Audience

Post­grad­u­ate stu­dents and ear­ly-career researchers in urban­ism and relat­ed fields (urban geog­ra­phy, plan­ning, land­scape archi­tec­ture) — espe­cial­ly those new to pro­gram­ming or tran­si­tion­ing from pro­pri­etary GIS soft­ware to open-source R‑based work­flows.

Ready to participate?

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.