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Creating Municipal Land Use Maps With ArcGIS Pro

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 provide an example of the creation of such a map using data from the City of Spokane. The final product will be similar to this revised map that originally appeared in their 2017 comprehensive plan.

Acquire the Data

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.

Municipal Open Data Portals

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.

• You can usually find open data portals for a city by Googling the city name and "open data."
• Download options commonly include shapefiles, file geodatabases, and GeoJSON files. Although all three formats can be imported into ArcGIS Pro, the shapefile is usually the safest and easiest option to work with.
• Note that a shapefile is actually a collections of files that is distributed in a .zip archive, which can be opened in the Windows file explorer. On Mac computers, you can extract the file by double-clicking the .zip file on the desktop or in the Mac Finder.

The minimum set of files for a map of this type would include:

• Roads
• Railroads
• Water bodies
• Land use types
• Municipal boundaries

The following video uses the City of Spokane (WA) Open GIS Data portal as an example of how to download city GIS data.

TIGER/Line Shapefiles

In the absence of complete municipal data, a good alternative is the use of geospatial data from the US Census Bureau, which makes much of their geospatial data available as shapefiles derived from their Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing database (TIGER/Line).

You can find the current download page by Googling "TIGER shapefiles."

The files of interest for a base map include:

• Roads
• Rails (national file)
• Water (area hydrography)

The video below demonstrates downloading of TIGER/Line shapefiles and import using the Export Features tool, which copies the features into the project geodatabase to keep all your data together.

Alternatively, you can download the county-level All Lines file, which contains a variety of lines, including both roads and rail lines clipped to the county boundary. However, symbolizing this layer requires filtering and grouping based on highly detailed MTFCC (feature class codes), and use of the three special purpose files listed above will likely be easier.

Municipal boundaries are in the Places file.

There is no TIGER equivalent to land use or zoning.

Create the Project

Create a new project in ArcGIS Pro and give it a meaningful name.

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).

• You can view this map of different SPCS projections in order to find the EPSG number projection appropriate to the local area.
• The SPCS projections have been modified over the years to reflect improved surveying technology, and you should generally use the most recent version unless you are working on a project that is based on an older projection. For Spokane, we use NAD 83 (2011) US Feet: EPSG:6597.
• Right click on the map Properties and under Coordinate System you can search for the projection by the EPSG number.

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.

Exploring the Fields

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.

• Add Data the road data to the map.
• Road data commonly comes with one or more fields that reflect the class of road. Right click on the layer and view the Attribute Table to explore the fields to find the appropriate road class variable.
• Once you have found one or two possible fields, you should symbolize the the roads as Unique Values to find the field that seems to best capture the hierarchy.
• For this data, the field is RoadClass.

Grouped Values

A road class variable may have more detailed class divisions than you may need for a base map, and keeping all those clasees will clutter your legend.

For this example variable, we will group the values into the four different types specified above in order to reduce the different line colors and thicknesses to more easily readable number.

• Right click on the road layer and view the Symbology.
• Drag the different road types so that similar types are together in the order.
• For this example we will form three groups: Local, Arterial, and Interstate.
• For each group, click on the Value of the top member of the group, hold down the Shift key, and click toe bottom member of the group to select all members of the group.
• Right click on the selected classes and click Group Values.
• Double click on the group label names to
• Adjust the symbology to three different thicknesses of gray. Gray is a good choice because the roads are for context and should be in the background.

Symbol Layer Drawing Order

Because larger roads are generally considered more significant than smaller roads, the larger roads should generally be drawn so that they are on top at intersections. This is especially true with limited access roads like interstates that have overpasses over local roads.

• Right click on the road layer and view the Symbology.
• Click the Drawing Order icon.
• Select Enable symbol layer drawing.
• Drag the most important roads to the top and the least important to the bottom.

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.

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.

• Click the List by Labeling icon.
• Under your road layer, you should see a label class. Right click and select Labeling Properties...
• Under Label expression, make sure there is a road name attribute selected.
• Under SQL, add a New expression and Create new expression.
• Create the condition where your road class variable is equal to the type of road you want to label. In this example, we lable only major arterial roads.
• Change the Symbol to be a small, light gray font that will only be vible if you look closely.

Interstate Shields

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

One issue with interstates is that road data may not contain just the interstate number. If you have multiple interstates, you may need to create multiple label classes.

• Click on one of the interstate to view the attributes and find an attribute with the interstate number. In this case it is FedRoute.
• Click the List by Labeling icon.
• Right click on the layer and Create Label Class...
• Give the label class a meaningful name.
• If needed, change the Expression to use the interstate number field.
  • If the only fields available begin with "I-" you can remove the prefix using the replace() function in the Expression box.
  • For example, if your road name field is STR_NAME, the Expression would be:
    replace($feature.STR_NAME, "I-", "")
• Click the SQL icon and add a new expression that selects only the interstate highway road types you will be symbolizing with this road class.
• On the ribbon at the top of the screen, select Labeling and Text Symbol Style, and scroll down to select one of the Shield icons.
• On the Labeling ribbon under Label Placement Style, select Shield.
• Under the Label Placement Properties, Position, and Remove duplicate labels, select Remove within fixed distance. This will prevent duplicate labels for multiple lanes or road segments.

TIGER Road Shapefiles

In some cases, 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 the US Census Bureau's TIGER shapefile of roads in your county.

There are two classification fields you can use, although neither will likely be perfect for your area: RTTYP (route type codes) and MTFCC (feature class codes).

With RTTYP, I is used for interstates, M for municipal roads, and C, S, and U for highways. Municipal roads include arterials, which will limit your middle class to highways.

Other Base Map Layers

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.

Rail Lines

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

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 Spokane.

• Add the layer and right click to select Symbology.
• Remove the fill, since we will be using fill later for land use.
• Make the outline dashed.
• Change the cloor to black with 50% transparency. Because these boundaries often coincide with roads and bodies of water, making them semitransparent will prevent them from obscuring notable reference features.
• Make sure the layer is the topmost layer so that the boundary lines are not obscured by other features.

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). Cities began passing laws in the late 19th century prohibiting "nuisance" businesses (notably slaughterhouses) from specific areas of cities, and that practice evolved into comprehensive zoning codes that first emerged in New York City in 1919. Zoning enhances property values and quality-of-life in selected areas of cities while also reinforcing segregation by class and race (Furth 2019, Metzenbaum 1957).

Most major US cities have zoning codes and they often make geospatial zoning data available to the public through their open data portals. 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.

Explore the Fields

Add the land use layer to the map.

As with the road layer, you will want to explore the different fields with View Attributes to find the appropriate land use class variable. In this data, the field is LandUse.

These land use classes may be cryptic abbreviations. The definitions of those abbreviations may be defined in the metadata. In this case, the metadata is useless, and we consult the printed map to get some better idea what the abbreviations mean.

Generalized Categories

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

• Right click on the layer and select Symbology.
• Change the symbology type to Unique Values and choose the land use class field you found above.
• Drag the classes so that the different types of land use are clumped in the order. For this example, we group maps into five categories:
  • Commercial
  • Industrial
  • Institutional
  • Open Space
  • Residential
• Remove the unneeded classes.
• For each group, click on the Value of the top member of the group, hold down the Shift key, and click toe bottom member of the group to select all members of the group.
• Right click and select Group Values.
• Click on the Label to change it to the name of the group.

Color Palette

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

• One approach to promoting accessibility for folks with red-green color blindness is to choose colors that are shades of red to blue or green to blue. The following colors are used in this example:
  • Commercial: Light blue
  • Industrial: Dark gray
  • Institutional: Light gray
  • Open Space: Dark green
  • Residential: Light green
• Remove the borders from the land use areas so they do not conflict with the base map.
• On the ribbon under Feature Layer and Appearance, change Layer Blend to Multiply so the area colors add tinting to the base map rather than obscure it.

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.

• Under Insert select Layout.
• Choose a paper size based on the size of the target document. Given the amount of detail in the base map, tabloid (11 x 17 inches) seems appropriate.
• Choose an orientation so your features most fully fill the area. Since this area is slightly higher than it is wide, we use portrait orientation.

Map Frame

• Add a new map frame for the main map area.
• Right click on the map frame and select Properties and Placement to set the sizing and position. While you can do this by sight, you can assure clean centering and sizing by entering numeric values.
  • Width: 10 in
  • Height: 14 in
  • X: 0.5 in from left edge
  • Y: 2.5 in from bottom edge
• Activate the map frame and adjust the zoom to fill the frame with the features.

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.

Title

• Insert a straight text box for the title that can be easily resized.
• Change the text symbol (font) if desired.

Legend

Metadata

• Insert a Rectangle text box for the metadata (date, cartographer, data source).
• Insert a logo for branding. If you are doing this as an academic exercise, you may want to use your institutional logo rather than the city logo so you accurately represent the map source.
• If you are creating a map like this for a government agency, you may need to include a disclaimer to avoid any legal jeapordy for inaccuracies in the data or representations.

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.

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.