12 replies to this topic

[Hans van der Maarel]

I'm working on a new map for a client, big city at 1:5000 scale and possibly bigger. One of the plans I had was showing the building use. I have been able to get that kind of data out of the property tax database (insert horror story about the 500+ Mb database here... apparently somebody thought numbering the columns was better than naming them...), link that to the address points and overlay them with the building contours, so for every building I have the use available.

However... there's 259 different types of use in the database... I want to narrow that down to a more manageable number of classes. I was thinking of the following:

• Residential
• Business
• Care (hospitals etc.)
• Education
• Government
• Religion
• Recreation
• Retail

Any comments or suggestions on this? Any samples of similar maps?

And then on to the second problem:
How would you handle buildings with multiple uses? E.g. a ground floor of shops (retail) with apartments (residential) on the upper floors.

[David Medeiros]

And then on to the second problem:
How would you handle buildings with multiple uses? E.g. a ground floor of shops (retail) with apartments (residential) on the upper floors.

Add a "Mixed Use" class, retail & residential will be the most common. Would Business cover "Commercial/Industrial"?

[Hans van der Maarel]

Add a "Mixed Use" class, retail & residential will be the most common. Would Business cover "Commercial/Industrial"?

Yes, business would cover commercial/industrial but I'm kinda leaning towards splitting those as well. Technically there's also another class: agricultural.

"Mixed Use" is a good idea, the original data does include all of the possible mixed use on a single address combinations and I can figure out which ones are going to be mixed use by building. Unfortunately it does cover way more than just retail & residential (many doctors and dentists have an office in their home)

[l.jegou]

I think that the info missing in your presentation is the destination of the map : which user for what use ?

Taking the user point of view you can determine what categories makes better sense. If the user is a city planner, perhaps taxes relevant to business types of occupation are an important angle. If he is a commercial/marketing planner, consumer densities and commercial concentrations are important, etc.

[Hans van der Maarel]

I think that the info missing in your presentation is the destination of the map : which user for what use ?

Taking the user point of view you can determine what categories makes better sense. If the user is a city planner, perhaps taxes relevant to business types of occupation are an important angle. If he is a commercial/marketing planner, consumer densities and commercial concentrations are important, etc.

It would be primarily for internal use by the municipal government. That would still mean the use can range from "something nice on the wall" to let's say a traffic planner. Everybody in the organisation has access to the internal map viewer, but we're trying to make something that looks nicer and is on paper.

[BioGeoMan]

I think you have a manageable number of classes, albeit general in nature, but to go from 259 to 8 is quite an accomplishment. For "mixed-use", I think it is a problem of symbology. Once you have your symbology chosen for the 8 classes, you can combine two (or more) symbologies to show the type of mixed use (e.g. red - residential, yellow - business --- then create a simple hatch of red and yellow). Employing this for all multiple use types would only require one additional generalized class, totaling 9 classes, instead of trying to symbolize multiple scenarios for mixed use.

And if you really want to make more work for yourself, on the mixed use areas, you could calculate how much of the building (area) is used for one class or the other and show that on the map as well. the point of this would be to show the reader what the primary use of the building is (e.g. a 10-story building where the ground floor is business and the other 9 floors are residential).

It would also be interesting to overlay the municipality's zoning layer to see if it actually matches up with use

Thanks,

[Gretchen Peterson]

I think you can use the term "mixed use" for both retail/residential and service/residential. I believe the tax codes usually treat those as similar as well (given that a dentist office in a home still has to have some kind of special use permit as opposed to just, say, a cartography business in your home where there aren't any clients coming or going).

Overall I think your idea is a great one and that 8 classes is plenty. I do feel for you regarding the numbered columns!

[Hans van der Maarel]

I think you can use the term "mixed use" for both retail/residential and service/residential. I believe the tax codes usually treat those as similar as well (given that a dentist office in a home still has to have some kind of special use permit as opposed to just, say, a cartography business in your home where there aren't any clients coming or going).

Overall I think your idea is a great one and that 8 classes is plenty. I do feel for you regarding the numbered columns!

Well, we've narrowed it down to these classes:
Residential
Commercial (e.g. shops and offices)
Industrial
Agricultural
Recreation
Services (education, government, religion, healthcare etc)
Mixed
Other

We've nicknamed this the "SimCity classification", as that leans heavily on the residential-commercial-industrial mix. I'll see if I can grab some samples next time I'm there.

[natcase]

I think you can use the term "mixed use" for both retail/residential and service/residential. I believe the tax codes usually treat those as similar as well (given that a dentist office in a home still has to have some kind of special use permit as opposed to just, say, a cartography business in your home where there aren't any clients coming or going).

Overall I think your idea is a great one and that 8 classes is plenty. I do feel for you regarding the numbered columns!

Well, we've narrowed it down to these classes:
Residential
Commercial (e.g. shops and offices)
Industrial
Agricultural
Recreation
Services (education, government, religion, healthcare etc)
Mixed
Other

We've nicknamed this the "SimCity classification", as that leans heavily on the residential-commercial-industrial mix. I'll see if I can grab some samples next time I'm there.

Minneapolis-St Paul Metro GIS has a similar system, which you can see the metadata for here. Their "services" category is "institutional" and while using the data set cartographically is mostly a matter of agglomerating classes, that one is a bugger... it consistently needs to be pulled apart block by block. Cemeteries are in there, for example. I'd think carefully about pulling out schools and healthcare from the mix: specific planning needs for those.

Also, consider keeping a "public" and "private" distinguishing layer, so you can separate a park from a golf course (another example from our local GIS, where Golf is separate from Parks and Open Space).

[Hans van der Maarel]

Minneapolis-St Paul Metro GIS has a similar system, which you can see the metadata for here. Their "services" category is "institutional" and while using the data set cartographically is mostly a matter of agglomerating classes, that one is a bugger... it consistently needs to be pulled apart block by block. Cemeteries are in there, for example. I'd think carefully about pulling out schools and healthcare from the mix: specific planning needs for those.

Also, consider keeping a "public" and "private" distinguishing layer, so you can separate a park from a golf course (another example from our local GIS, where Golf is separate from Parks and Open Space).

Special locations, such as schools, religious buildings and major healthcare facilities (e.g. a hospital, not a dentist who holds office in his home) would be indicated with a symbol and/or name.

Good point about public vs private, but I don't think we'd want to make that disctinction. I think that could boil down to a discussion on how we classify: administratively vs topographically. Or to put it in a more blunt example: if there's no services being held in a church anymore, does it cease to be a church? (we've had a lot of trouble with that in the past: the administrative data would only list addresses where there was an actual religious group registered, even if it were somebodies house).

[Martin Gamache]

I would make the following adustments:

High density residential ( 3+ units)
Multi unit residential (2-3 units)
Single family residential

institutional: educational/religious/

industrial

commercial

mixed use (commercial/res.)

other

[Dennis McClendon]

Sorry I missed this topic earlier. Coloring of land use maps is a pretty common discussion among city planners, and there are American conventions (not really standards). My Atlas of Amsterdam is at home, but it probably has some nice examples. I'm sure there are lots of examples in the ESRI map books, and probably a couple of templates on the ESRI resource website. You definitely want to have color indicate residential intensity, as Martin suggests above.

http://www.google.co...lient=firefox-a

As for mixed-use, the usual way to do this in the States is to color the building footprint by majority use, and add a narrow border along the building perimeter or the shopping frontage(s) for ground-floor retail. This might be tricky to do automatically, though I'm sure you are enough of a data wizard to code the shopping streets and have a buffer that intersects with the buildings IF ground-floor retail exists.

[Matthew Hampton]

We have both a detailed and a generalized Land Use system of classification.

Our generalized classes include: Commercial, Industrial, Mixed Use, Multi family, Single family, Parks/Open spaces, Rural Residential.

Our detailed system includes 26 classes including 7 types of single family, 4 multi-family, 4 industrial classes, etc.