Introduction

This book is a step-by-step guide for using GIS to perform site analysis in the urban & architectural design process. The main GIS platform used for handling geospatial data is the open-source QGIS platform that is freely available. This is not a complete guide to QGIS, but just explains a collection of features in QGIS that are useful for design. This guide is written for QGIS 3.16. You can install QGIS 3.16 here. For some of the workflows I have used other open-source and freely available tools to process the data. In principle, I have tried to used open-source tools for the workflows to make sure they are openly accessible.

How to Use This Book

The book is divided into 3 parts. The First Part: Concepts covers basic concepts about GIS. The Second Part: Tasks covers tasks for achieving a spatial analysis. Each task is a combination of multiple sub-tasks. The Third Part: Sub-Tasks covers sub-task that performs a basic function. You can string multiple sub-tasks into a task to achieve an objective. Usually in the design process, designers have to perform a series of these tasks to produce a mapping.

You can search through the whole book with the search bar. Please use the search bar to find relevant workflows and tasks for your purpose.