Geosnap: The Geospatial Neighborhood Analysis Package: Open Tools for Urban, Regional, and Neighborhood Science

Abstract

Understanding neighborhood context is critical for social science research, public policy analysis, and urban planning. The social meaning, formal definition, and formal operationalization of “neighborhood” depends on the study or application, however, so neighborhood analysis and modeling requires both flexibility and adherence to a formal pipeline. Maintaining that balance is challenging for a variety of reasons. To address those challenges, geosnap , the Geospatial Neighborhood Analysis Package provides a suite of tools for exploring, modeling, and visualizing the social context and spatial extent of neighborhoods and regions over time. It brings together state-of-the-art techniques from geodemographics, regionalization, spatial data science, and segregation analysis to support social science research, public policy analysis, and urban planning. It provides a simple interface tailored to formal analysis of spatiotemporal urban data.