UChicago's Committee on Geographical Sciences Offers Two New Courses on Spatial Analysis

INTRODUCTION TO LOCATION ANALYSIS

Understanding the location of business activities - agricultural, industrial, retail, and knowledge-based - has long been a focus for economic geographers, regional scientists, and urban planners. The course "Introduction to Location Analysis", taught by Kevin Credit,  traces the key theories and conceptual models that have been developed over time to explain why economic activities tend to locate where they do. To introduce and explain these theories, Credit will cover several foundational concepts in economic geography and urban planning, such as bid-rent theory, locational triangulation, various models of urban structure and growth, urban market areas, transportation, economic restructuring, and the "back-to-the-city" movement. The several GIS exercises will teach students the basic principles of location optimization and will help to illuminate the foundational theoretical principles of economic geography.

INTRODUCTION TO GIS AND SPATIAL ANALYSIS FOR SOCIAL SCIENTISTS

Marynia Kolak has designed the course "Introduction to GIS and Spatial Analysis for Social Sciences" to help social scientists to consider spatial aspects of their research questions. The focus is on research questions relevant in the social sciences, which inspires the selection of the particular methods to handle geographic information and the statistical analysis - how the data are collected, organized and transformed, and how these spatial aspects affect statistical methods.  Students will have a hands-on approach, using open source software as QGIS and R, to perform several methods: spatial data integration, transformations between different spatial scales, the computation of "spatial" variables, geovisualization, visual analytics, and the assessment of spatial autocorrelation

Both courses will be offered in 2019 (Spring quarter).