The Jabuti award is one of the most prestigious literary awards in Brazil. The award includes a broad range of categories, and this year they have created the Academic Jabuti Award to recognize the excelence of academic books in various fields. I’m thrilled to share that our book “Introduction to urban accessibility: a practical guide with R” has been shortlisted as a finalist in the ‘Architecture, Urbanism, Design, and Urban and Regional Planning’ category.

For many decades now, scientists and policy makers recognize the importance of evidence-informed public policies in areas such as health, education, and others. This should be no different in urban and regional planning. Open data and computational methods are essential to develop evidence-informed policies that help us promote more integrated, inclusive, and sustainable urban planning. This book makes a contribution in this direction.

In many ways, this is not a conventional academic book, though. This book provides a very hands-on approach to teaching/learning urban accessibility analysis, which has become a key element in urban data science and urban analytics. All the material in the book is presented with reproducible examples using open datasets and the R programming language. In fact, the book was entirely written with open source code in R and Quarto ( Github repo here). Now the icing on the cake 🍰 you can run the code used in the book online in your browser with Binder. Also, although there’s a PDF of the book that can be downloaded, the book is a native online website, which is quite nice because it makes it possible for us to track the readership of the book. Since the launch of the book, we’ve had already 19K unique “users”, which is really not bad for an academic book in such a small niche of urban and spatial data science.

Fingers crossed.