R sf – Combining Polygons that Share Borders Using ‘sf’ Package

Question

I have rows of respondents with their residential census tract polygon and am trying to generate first-order aggregated areas. Meaning I want a given respondent’s census tract polygon to be merged with all the polygons touching its borders. A separate file contains all possible US census tract polygons.

st_union seems appropriate only for aggregating together ALL interesting polygons to a single mass polygon.

Using st_intersection and then aggregating by row ID seems viable, but I’m unsure how to do the aggregation procedure.

I hope to remain within the sf environment.

Similar threads I’ve quered:
Dissolve only overlapping polygons in R

Joining polygons in R

Answer 1

If I understood correctly, given a polygon layer with N features, what you need is to generate a new set of N geometries where each geometry is the result of a union with it's neighbors.

A straightforward solution can be to use a for loop going over the 1:N polygons, applying st_union on the current set of neighbors for polygon i in each "round", as in -

geom = list()
for(i in 1:nrow(pol)) {
  geom[[i]] = st_union(pol[pol[i, ], ])
}
geom = do.call(c, geom)

Where pol is the original layer and geom is the new set of merged geometries.

Here is a reproducible example using the nc dataset -

library(sf)

# Sample data
nc = st_read(system.file("shape/nc.shp", package="sf"))

# Plot 1
plot(st_geometry(nc))
plot(st_geometry(nc[25, ]), add = TRUE, col = "red")

# Merging each polygon with its neighbors
geom = list()
for(i in 1:nrow(nc)) {
  geom[[i]] = st_union(nc[nc[i, ], ])
}
geom = do.call(c, geom)

# Plot 2
plot(geom)
plot(geom[25], add = TRUE, col = "red")

Plot 1 shows the original layer, with a specific polygon n=25 shown in red -

Plot 2 shows the layer with the new geometries, where the new polygon n=25 is merged with its neighbors -