Rcrisp: a tool for automated morphological delineation of urban river spaces

The presentation

Accelerated urbanization, climate change, and the increasing need for resilience to environmental shocks and stresses have brought urban river spaces, as vital green-blue corridors and central public spaces, to the forefront of urban transformations worldwide. Yet, as researchers and practitioners from various disciplines tackle the spatial implications of this trend, they face the challenge of capturing the specificities and complexities of riverside urban areas in a reliable way. Moreover, a proper understanding of the phenomenon requires both a better understanding of location-specific conditions and more insight into global, transferrable patterns. An essential part of this challenge is how boundaries are drawn in the analysis of urban areas surrounding rivers, as the resulting spatial units used for spatial analysis and decisions can have a considerable impact on the sustainability of urban river space transformations. 

This challenge motivated the development of rcrisp, a software for automated and scalable delineation of urban river spaces. rcrisp is meant to facilitate integrated local analyses and enable large-scale comparative analyses across a wide range of domains of application, making the process of drawing river space boundaries more methodical and reproducible, and, by extension, urban river space transformation more legitimate. The delineation method (Forgaci, 2018) implemented in rcrisp considers both the topography of the terrain to identify the river valley and the configuration of the urban fabric—specifically, street and rail networks as persistent spatial structures, as well as buildings as occlusions that partition urban space. rcrisp is implemented as an open-source R package (Forgaci and Nattino, 2025), and made available via the CRAN repository.

References

• Forgaci, C., & Nattino, F. (2025). Rcrisp: Automate the Delineation of Urban River Spaces [Computer software]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15793526
• Forgaci, C. (2018). Integrated Urban River Corridors: Spatial Design for Social-Ecological Integration in Bucharest and Beyond [Delft University of Technology]. https://doi.org/10.7480/abe.2018.31

The speakers

Claudiu Forgaci is an Assistant Professor of Urban Design and Analytics whose work explores the integration of social and ecological systems in urban environments across spatial and temporal scales. His research, teaching and practice center on the design and analysis of riverside urban spaces. He develops design-driven methods, open datasets, and software tools that facilitate comparative urban analysis. Claudiu advocates for open science in research and teaching, and is engaged in building communities that support its practice.

Francesco Nattino 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.

Yehan Wu is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Urbanism, Delft University of Technology. Her research focuses on the planning and design of green-blue infrastructure and the role of nature-based solutions in climate adaptation. She currently works on the EU Interreg project “Restoring urban streams to promote biodiversity, climate adaptation and to improve quality of life in cities”, developing water restoration strategies from an urban-spatial perspective.

Attending the presentation

You can join the presentation via Teams. The presentation will take place on Tuesday 18 November 15:00 CET on Teams. Click here to enter the Teams portal.

The River Cities Network presentation series

The River Cities Network presentation series is an online platform for teams in the River Cities Network (RCN) to introduce their river-city case study projects to other members of the network and to an external audience. Teams have approximately 30 minutes to present their projects, after which there will be approximately 30 minutes for discussion. RCN teams that are interested in presenting can contact rcn@iias.nl.