I was invited to participate in the Tracing Sustainable Urban River Space Transformations workshop at the Lorentz Center in Leiden. Five days of focused, intensive discussion organized by Claudiu Forgaci (TU Delft), Francesco Nattino (Netherlands eScience Center), and Angelica Stan (Ion Mincu University), and sponsored by TU Delft and the eScience Center.
The central question was how morphologically grounded spatial analysis can support decision-making around urban river spaces: how boundaries are drawn, how analysis units are defined, and what impact those choices have on the sustainability of riverside transformations. The workshop was motivated in part by the development of , an open-source software package for spatial delineation of urban river spaces, but the scope was much broader than the tool itself.
A diverse group of researchers and practitioners brought case studies from different cities and contexts. The format was genuinely collaborative, closer to a working group than a conference. A position paper consolidating the expert views and discussions from the workshop is forthcoming.