Urban Planning - GIS for Local Government

Applications in GIS - Mod 9

Local governments worldwide use zoning as a method of land use planning.  The first scenario of  this week's exercise had us viewing property and obtaining data from Marion County Appraiser's website to create a site map of the parcel of a client who wanted to find out what, if any impacts a fly-in community would have on adjacent parcels.  To do this we learned about different types of zoning codes and their meanings and how to download a table of parcel data to a GIS file.  We then joined that table to our parcels feature class to access that data.  Next we did some editing to capture only those parcels we were interested in.

With our selection set we moved on to Data Driven Pages which is an awesome tool that allows you to generate a series of maps using a single layout and applying it to numerous map extents.  To do this we created a grid index that covered our entire area of interest then used this grid as an intersect with our zoning feature class to create a zoning index for the area of interest to symbolize according to zone codes.  Next we followed some seemingly convoluted steps to create a locator map.  We copied our index grid, Index2400, to another feature class of a different name, Locator_Mask, then copied that and renamed that copy Locator-Mask Current Page.  So in the end we had three identical layers with different names all in the locator map data frame.  Which makes no sense at all.  Until you manipulate each of them to do something different.  With Data Driven Pages enabled we were able to set up the Locator_Mask Currant Page layer to highlight within the locator map the current page being displayed in the extents.  Locator_Mask masked the rest of the grid and the original, Index2400, was symbolized to outline each page in white and label the pages.  So the data driven pages allowed the locator map to match the portion of the map being displayed in the extents and using Dynamic Text allowed the page number and the name of the index grid to update as you page through the file.  This set up allowed me to add all the standard map elements just once, and yet produce 16 different maps.  I did this quite simply by exporting my map to a PDF file specifying to export all pages to a single file.  For the last step in this portion we generated a report using the Create Report option in the attribute table and exported that to a PDF file as well.

The second scenario had us doing a lot of editing.  We had to merge a couple parcels and update the attribute information in them, then split a portion out of that to create a new parcel and update that attribute information.  This was actually a lot of fun because it included drawing lines.  Next we had to do some data manipulation and searches to report on suitable sites for a new Extension office to be built in Gulf County.  The requirements were the land had to be county owned, 20 acres or larger and vacant.  Gathering this data required using Query Builder to limit the records to those acres equal to or greater than 20 and joining tables.  Again, we used the Create Report feature of the attribute table to report our results.