Lab 5 - Final Lab

Question: What city in the Chicago area is the best place to live? I’m moving to Chicago to pursue a GIS career and the company I work for is located in downtown Chicago. I don’t want to live in the busy city, since I’m from a small town and prefer something smaller, so I decided to find a city within the county that Chicago is located in. The county is Cook County and it contains Chicago as well as 77 other suburbs and cities. To narrow down my selections I wanted a city that meets all of the requirements below:

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.