The Right Tools for the Job: The Case for Spatial Science Tool-Building

Abstract

This paper was presented as the 8th annual Transactions in GIS plenary address at the American Association of Geographers annual meeting in Washington, DC. The spatial sciences have recently seen growing calls for more accessible software and tools that better embody geographic science and theory. Urban spatial network science offers one clear opportunity: from multiple perspectives, tools to model and analyze nonplanar urban spatial networks have traditionally been inaccessible, atheoretical, or otherwise limiting. This paper reflects on this state of the field. Then it discusses the motivation, experience, and outcomes of developing OSMnx, a tool intended to help address this. Next it reviews this tool's use in the recent multidisciplinary spatial network science literature to highlight upstream and downstream benefits of open-source software development. Tool-building is an essential but poorly incentivized component of academic geography and social science more broadly. To conduct better science, we need to build better tools. The paper concludes with paths forward, emphasizing open-source software and reusable computational data science beyond mere reproducibility and replicability.

References in corpus (8)

• Spatial Networks
• OSMnx: New Methods for Acquiring, Constructing, Analyzing, and Visualizing Complex Street Networks
• Urban Spatial Order: Street Network Orientation, Configuration, and Entropy
• A Multi-Scale Analysis of 27,000 Urban Street Networks: Every US City, Town, Urbanized Area, and Zillow Neighborhood
• The statistical physics of Cities
• Spatial Information and the Legibility of Urban Form: Big Data in Urban Morphology
• Planarity and Street Network Representation in Urban Form Analysis
• Quantifying Life Quality as Walkability on Urban Networks: The Case of Budapest

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Using Open Data and Open-Source Software to Develop Spatial Indicators of Urban Design and Transport Features for Achieving Healthy and Sustainable Cities
• Street Network Models and Indicators for Every Urban Area in the World
• A Generalized Framework for Measuring Pedestrian Accessibility around the World Using Open Data
• The State of the Art in Visual Analytics for 3D Urban Data