Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Urban Studies and Planning 11 520 A Workshop on Geographic Information Systems 11 188 Urban Planning and Social Science Laboratory Homework 1 Mapping of Community Characteristics Due online on Wednesday October 13 2010 before the start of class 2 PM NOTE Homework assignments will take longer and be much more important to your grade than any one lab exercise so devote your energy accordingly INTRODUCTION In this exercise you will explore the spatial patterns of the housing and socio economic characteristics of communities in and around Boston To assist in this task we provide 1 demographic data at the census tract level from the 1990 US Census and 2 boundary files for cities and towns major roads shopping center locations and census tracts We ask you to use these data to prepare a short report with textual discussion plus three maps for Part I and two maps with a table for Part II Before starting the hands on work read through the entire assignment to get a sense of the datasets analytic approach and processing steps Then make sure you can access the datasets in the 11 520 Locker As explained in the lab exercises you can find the locker by navigating through the subdirectories on network drive Z or you can attach the class locker to a new drive letter we suggest Drive M for maps The earlier lab exercises explained how to mount the Andrew File System locker afs athena mit edu course 11 11 520 on network drive M DATA Census Tract Boundaries The census tract boundaries are saved in a shapefile that contains only the boundary geometry and a few geographic identifiers like county track number etc This shapefile must be joined with a dbf formatted table in order to relate the census data to specific census tracts The census tract shapefile is called msa5 tr90 shp It is located in the class data locker M data and contains all the 1990 census tracts in the five Eastern Mass counties in and around Boston Socioeconomic Data for the Census Tracts The socioeconomic data for these tracts have been pulled from the 1990 Census SF3A datasets and are stored in the same M data directory in a dbf formatted table called msa5 tr90 data dbf This file must be linked or joined to the attribute table for the tract boundaries by a common field called STCNTYTR before you will be able to generate thematic maps using the census data STCNTYTR is the abbreviation for STate CouNTY TRact Use the ArcMap help files to see how to join the data table to the attribute table if you want to get started with the homework before we show you how to do this in class The msa5 tr90 data dbf table includes 60 variables from the much longer list of all variables in the decennial Census Take a look at the dictionary for the specific census data fields in msa5 tr90 data dbf Note this list is a subset of the full Census Bureau s listing and technical documentation for the hundreds of population and housing variables from the 1990 census This technical document is archived in the class locker as M data census90 census90stf3td pdf More details about the 1990 US Census are available in Tom Grayson s and Annie Thompson s notes on Making Sense of the Census Be aware however that some of the online references in these notes are no longer available and you will need ONLY the shorter list of 60 variables mentioned above in order to do the homework During the next few weeks we will have additional exercises using US census data but we will use the 2000 US census for those exercises and will provide the relevant technical documentation Also note that small area comparison of census data across decades can be tricky due to changes in census tract and block group boundaries MIT s Rotch Library has CDs from a third party firm GeoLytics which has reconciled past census data to year 2000 boundaries Should you wish to analyze trends in census data for your individual project later in the semester you will likely want to use the GeoLytics CD Shopping Centers and Major Roads Besides the census data which will be used primarily in Problem 1 you will need a map of major roads and shopping centers for Problem 2 The shopping center coverage for the Boston metro area is called shopcntrs and is also stored in M data The major roads layer is called majmhda1 and can be also found in the directory M data All of these coverages use the following coordinate system Massachusetts State Plane Mainland Zone NAD 1983 meters Be sure to set the map units and distance units in the Data Frame Properties window so you can measure distances in your Data View window and be sure that the distances you compute in Problem 2 are reasonable Data Sources The roads coverage comes from the Mass Highway Department via MassGIS and the shopping center coverage is proprietary data provided by SSR Research circa 1995 for internal MIT educational use SUMMARY A map should always have a purpose A good map should deliver the information that you want readers to understand Therefore the map should be very intuitive without requiring reading the discussion of the map in your paper or report Try to give the map to your friends who have no training in GIS to see if they can recognize the message you were trying to deliver and ask them whether they find the evidence to be compelling Your goal is to gain some understanding of housing and socio economic patterns in metro Boston Try to have fun and explore ArcMap while doing this homework Use the on line help to experiment with ArcMap s capabilities Here s another mapmaking hint you can specify different colors for your foreground and background features you may want to turn off the outlines of polygons in a layer and you may want to choose different widths and sizes for lines and symbols Exploit this functionality when overlaying different data layers To make your maps more easily interpreted you can overlay the political boundaries of Massachusetts towns Also consider using the water bodies in Eastern Massachusetts The Mass boundaries are located in M data matown00 shp A shapefile of Eastern Massachusetts water bodies is available in M data msa water shp Problem 1 Exploratory Mapping Metropolitan Area Census Data 60 points 1 20 points Create a thematic or chloropleth map showing the population density of the MSA You should calculate density as persons P0010001 per acre landacre Normalizing by the landacre variable in the census data is more reliable than using the area variable since the