Although 2025 has started it may not be too late to shortly look back at the end of 2024. In November, I (Lucas van der Meer) was asked to give a workshop and a talk about spatial network analysis at the annual conference of the South African Statistical Association in Stellenbosch, South Africa. The invitation came from the Department of Statistics at the University of Pretoria, where I also spend a few days to exchange ideas and experiences. They do incredible work on spatial statistics and spatial linear network analysis, and it is nice to see how our different fields (geoinformatics and statistics) try to tackle similar problems and can learn from each other.

At the conference, I must say, it was slightly scary to speak for a room full of statisticians about the limitations of quantitative modelling when planning human-centered cities. But the talk was received well and sparked a nice discussion. The workshop focused on the usage of sfnetworks, an R package for spatial network analysis that I developed and maintain. If you are interested in the workshop materials, you can find them here: https://github.com/luukvdmeer/sfnetworks-workshop

Thanks to everyone involved in organizing the conference, attending the events, and hosting me. And let’s be honest: you can think of worse locations to have a conference. Obviously, I rented a mountainbike to explore the surrounding.

Currently we are working together with the University of Pretoria to continue our collaboration and keep exchanging knowledge in the coming years.