CRiSp

Accelerated urbanisation, 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 urban design and planning research tackles the spatial implications of this trend, it faces the challenge of capturing the specificities and complexities of riverside urban areas.

An essential part of that challenge is how boundaries are drawn in the analysis of urban areas surrounding rivers, as the resulting spatial units of analysis and decision-making can have a considerable impact on the sustainability of urban riverspace transformations.

To overcome this challenge, we have developed the rcrisp open-source software package. With this tool, 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.