Creating Municipal Land Use Maps with ArcGIS Pro

Rev. 7 February 2025

Despite the ubiquity and utility of the interactive maps commonly used by cities to distribute geospatial information to residents, there are still situations in municipal government where traditional static maps need to be incorprated into documents both for printing to paper and for archival preservation.

One notable example is land use maps used in city and county comprehensive urban planning documents. Comprehensive plans are official documents periodically created by city urban planning departments to encode a vision for the future of the city and serve as a policy guide to help lawmakers achieve that vision (Conglose 2021). While such plans are often highly contested, and are routinely ignored by decision-makers, they can be useful, detailed records of the condition of city infrastructure and form at the time they were created, as well as a useful historical record of the aspirations of city leaders.

Comprehensive plans contain a wide variety of geospatial information, often in the form of maps. Accordingly, they are rich source of examples for students of cartography who aspire to work in city agencies.

This tutorial will use Bloomington, IL (2020 population 78,680) as the city for an example land use map.

Spokane Land Use (City of Spokane 2021)

Land Use Polygons

Zoning is "the act or process of partitioning a city, town, or borough into zones reserved for different purposes (such as residence or business) (Merriam-Webster 2024).

Open data is "data that can be freely used, re-used and redistributed by anyone - subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and sharealike" (Open Knowledge Foundation 2018).

A fundamental value of open data is interoperability, which is "the ability of diverse systems and organizations to work together" and intermix different datasets (Open Knowledge Foundation 2018). When people can work together with a minimum of restrictions, this results greater individual productivity that, ideally, benefits society as a whole.

Many planning departments in large and medium-sized cities make their data freely available to the public via open data portals. These portals often use Socrata or ESRI's ArcGIS Hub software.

Acquire the Data

The McLean County GIS consortium makes zoning data for Bloomington, IL available for download through their data portal.

Acquiring and importing land used data for the City of Bloomington, IL

Explore the Fields

Finding and symbolizing the land use class field

Research the Land Use Codes

In large urban areas, fundamental land use types (residential, commercial, manufacturing) can be divided into a dizzying array of subcategories reflecting the contradictory interests and political power of diverse community stakeholders.

The land use classes in your data may be cryptic abbreviations. The definitions of those abbreviations may be defined in the metadata.

In this case, the metadata is useless, but a quick Google search finds a list of potential values in the Municipal Code.

Finding the meaning of the land use codes

Generalized Categories

Using a large number of land use classes would make a map difficult to read, and grouping them into generalized classes may keep the general point of the map prominent.

For this example, we group maps into five categories:

To group values:

Grouping land use categories

Color Palette

Double-click on the color patches to change the colors to contrasting colors.

Setting land use colors

State Plane Projection

In the US, local areas like cities are commonly mapped with a projection from the State Plane Coordinate System (SPCS), which was developed in the 1930s by the US Coast and Geodetic Survey to enable surveyors, mappers, and engineers to connect their land or engineering surveys to a common reference system (Stem 1990).

Finding and setting a state plane projection

Road Layer

A base map is a collection of geographic features that provide geographic context for the thematic symbols that are the focus of the map. Base maps need to provide enough information for readers to understand what is where, but the base map features need to be unobtrusive enough so that they do not clutter or obscure the thematic features.

For maps of urban areas, either road center lines or parcel boundary polygons (which effectively outline roads) are commonly used as the primary base map features. For this example with the complete area of a medium-sided US city, parcels would be too detailed, so we will use a layer of roads provided by the city.

TIGER Road Shapefiles

While some municipalities distribute detailed street data, but often the fields in road data available from cities may be inadequate for clearly classifying or labeling roads. In such cases, you may wish to use data from the US Census Bureau.

The US Census Bureau makes much of their geospatial data available as shapefiles derived from their Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing (TIGER/Line) database.

  1. Acquire: Visit the TIGER/Line Shapefiles website, download the All Roads shapefile for the county where your municipality is located, and unzip the file.
  2. Store: Run the Export Features tool to copy the data from the shapefile into a new feature class in the project geodatabase (Roads). Note that you need to specifically select a location in the project geodatabase, or the shapefile will simply be copied to a different shapefile.
USCB TIGER road shapefile

Grouped Values

There is a hierarchy of road importance and capacity that needs to be reflected in the map. Interstate highways usually are the most prominent, with decreasing visual intensity down through state highways, arterial roads, and local roads.

Grouping road classes

Remove Base Map

Once you have a clear road grid, if you haven't already, you should remove the default base map.

Base maps in ArcGIS Pro are the same base maps used in the ArcGIS Online web app, and while they are adequate for low-resolution web maps, paper has a higher resolution than computer screens, and those base maps will likely be fuzzy when printed. The base maps may also contain additional details (like labels or environmental features) that will clutter the map and make it harder to read.

Remove the base map

Road Labels

Because this will be a land use map rather than a road map, we will limit the number of road name labels only to the major arterial roads.

This will require creating a label class.

Road labels

Interstate Shields

Interstate highways (and some state highways) have numbers that are placed in shield graphics.

Interstate highway shields

Bodies of Water

Lakes, rivers, and streams are notable landmarks (and, sometimes, obstacles) that will often add meaningful context and contrast to a base map.

The USCB has a TIGER/Line Water shapefiles include separate shapefiles for area features (Lakes) and linear features (Creeks).

Bodies of water

Rail Lines

Rail lines are often important landmarks that can be useful on a base map, although care should be used so that maps of areas with extensive rail infrastructure are not too cluttered.

Rail lines

Political Boundaries

You will commonly want to add lines for political boundaries to delineate the jurisdiction of the authorities regulating land use. In this case, we use the municipal boundary of the City of Bloomington.

The TIGER/Line Places file contains boundaries for places in states.

City boundary

Layout

New Layout

Once you have designed your map, you need to create a layout for how that map will be displayed on the printed page.

Creating a new layout

Map Frame

Adding a map frame

Scale Bar and North Arrow

Because the spatial relationships of areas in cities are often unfamiliar, even to long-time residents, a scale bar gives context for knowing distances between locations on the map.

While maps generally place north on the top edge of the map, this is not always the case, and a north arrow helps viewers understand direction on the map.

Adding a scale bar and north arrow

Title

Adding a title

Legend

Add a legend to the layout.

Adding a legend

Metadata

Adding metadata

Neat Lines

Finally you should add neat lines that separate map elements from each other and give the map a clean, contained look.

You can add neat lines with rectangles. Even though the fill is transparent, you may need to Send to Back in the drawing Order so you can drag the map elements into appropriate locations.

Adding neat lines

Export PDF

Portable Document Format (PDF) is a standard document format that will usually render identically on different devices and on paper. Accordingly, PDF will usually be the way you want to share your map with other parties.

Adding neat lines

Save Your Project

When you are done with a project, you should save it as a project package on ArcGIS Online so that you can reopen it later on any computer if you need to use your base map.

  1. Go to the Share tab and select Project.

  2. Provide a name to save the project under. The default is the name of the current project.
  3. Copy the name into the Tags and Summary fields.
  4. Click the Share outside of organization box so your project database containing all of your layers is included in your project package.
  5. Unclick the Include Toolboxes and Include History Items check boxes so that history or toolbox errors to not cause your upload to fail.
  6. Analyze the project to find any problems.
  7. Package the project to upload it to ArcGIS Online. This may take a minute or two.
Saving a Project Package to ArcGIS Online

Appendix: The National Map

The National Map is a collection of products and services from the US Geological Survey (USGS) that provide access to basic geospatial information about the landscape of the United States and its territories (USGS 2025). Data from the National Map is an alternative when base map data from the USCB is unavailable or inadequate.

National Map data can be downloaded through the TNM Download (v2.0) web app.

Data is available in zipped shapefile, file geodatabase, and GeoPackage formats.

Transportation

USGS National Transportation Dataset consists of roads, railroads, trails, airports, and other features associated with the transport of people or products. The dataset is based on the US Census Bureau's TIGER/Line data set with some modification and augmentation performed by the USGS (USGS 2025).

This video demonstrates how to import a state road feature class into a project geodatabase.

  1. Acquire: Go to the TNM Download (v2.0) page.
  2. Store: Open the Export Features tool.
  3. Process: If you have a polygon you can use the Clip tool to clip the very large state dataset to a more specific area.
  4. Communicate:
  5. Repeat with the Trans_RailFeature feature class for railroads.
The National Map transportation data set

Hydrography

The National Hydrography Dataset (NHD) represents "the water drainage network of the United States with features such as rivers, streams, canals, lakes, ponds, coastline, dams, and streamgages" (USGS 2025). The NHD was retired in 2023 but as of this writing is the hydrography data set available on The National Map.

This video demonstrates how to import state water body and stream flow line feature classes into a project geodatabase.

  1. Acquire: Go to the TNM Download (v2.0) page.
  2. Store: Open the Export Features tool.
  3. Communicate:
  4. Repeat for the NHDFlowline feature class for streams.
The National Hydrography data set