1.
At least two miles from a hospital, just in case
of emergencies.
2.
At least three miles from a recreational area,
for my free time.
3.
At least a mile away from major interstate
highways, to avoid the noise.
4.
Within 15 miles of downtown Chicago.
I thought that if I could meet all of the criteria above I
would find a city that would fit my wants and needs.
Introduction: My
objective is to use this question as a way to showcase my skills and present
the knowledge that I picked up during this course through ArcMap. My intended
audience would be my future self if I chose to pursue a career in GIS in
Chicago and I would use this information to make a decision on where to live
given this situation. I chose this question because it was something that I
might actually want to use in the future and I thought it was an interesting
question to end this course with. I wanted to ask something that I would
actually want to know in a real-life situation.
Data Sources: The
data I needed to perform this project was, cities in Cook County, interstate
highways in Cook County, hospitals in Cook County, and recreation areas in Cook
County. I got all of this information from the GISOnline database in the DATA
folder in UWEC’s server. Data concerns I had included: precision of data, since
the database included the entire country, however the data was from 2010, so I
don’t think that age of the data was a factor with these certain types of
features.
Methods: First, I
took all of my data for cities, hospitals, recreation areas, and interstate
highways, and I narrowed the selection down to just those contained in Cook
County. Then, I added the “hospitals” and “recreation areas” features to
ArcMap. I buffered the hospitals two miles around (Fig 1) and the Recreation
Areas three miles around (Fig 2). I then intersected the two buffer zones and
created an area that was at least two miles from a hospital and at least three
miles from a recreation area (Fig 3). I then added the “interstates” feature to
the map and buffered around it one mile. I then used the “Erase” to get rid of
the area around the interstate highways that was within a mile (Fig 4). Then
made a feature class of just downtown Chicago and made a 15 mile buffer. I then
used “Erase” again and got rid of the acceptable area outside of the 15 mile
buffer (Fig 5). Then I had the area that met the criteria I used above. I then
used a spatial query to find the cities in Cook County that were within the
acceptable area.
Data Flow Model:
Results: There were 13 cities that met all of the criteria: Elmwood Park, River Grove, River Forest, Melrose Park, Evanston, Skokie, Berwyn, Oak Park, La Grange, Palos Heights, Oak Lawn, Evergreen Park, and Blue Island. The city that I chose was Berwyn because it is the closest city that met all of my criteria and it just happens to be my mother’s hometown!
Map of the Acceptable Cities:
Evaluation: I really enjoyed doing this project because it showed how much I learned in this course and the skills I earned that I can use in my future professional career. If I were to do this project again I would try to find more interesting data because I was pretty bad at search through the ArcGIS Online database and couldn’t find data that I thought was exciting. I faced some challenges in the data finding part of this project but I think if I were to just spend more time getting a feel for the system, I could come up with more fascinating data sources.
