The last chapter of our planning course was a brief description of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). It was extracted from Planning and Urban Design Standards (2006) written by Ann-Margaret Esnard, Nancy Sappington, and Milton R. Ospina. In the editors introduction, Birch mentions how GIS has become a widely used tool in urban and regional planning. It serves many important functions including “… inventorying land use, mapping demographic information, displaying zoning regulations, indentifying environmentally sensitive land, plotting streets and sewers, tracking capital projects, and outlining service needs related to crime, disease, or poverty.” Birch describes that GIS has transformed the planning profession by providing more information with which to make decisions.
In this chapter, the main components of GIS are identified. They are: hardware (the computer and other physical equipment), software (tools for storing, analyzing, and displaying spatial information), data sources (including existing sources, digitized items, field collected data, and remotely sensed information), and metadata (information about data sets). Regarding data, there are two different types: vector and raster. Vector data provides information concerning points, lines and polygons. Raster data provides information about geographic features such as land use, vegetation, slope, elevation, or aspect. The chapter also mentions the various functions of GIS commonly used by planners and designers. These are: query by location, query by attribute, boolean queries (combination of location and attribute queries), buffers, address matching, distance measuring, overlays and suitability analyses.
GIS and it’s important contribution to the planning profession is a great example of how advances in technology can change the scope of human activities. With the tool of GIS, I would imagine that the planning realm of New Regionalism (of which my last blog talked about) would be made significantly more viable. By this I mean, by making comprehensive geographic information more accessible, GIS increases the capacity for planners to plan for larger metropolitan regions.
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| Here is a conceptualisation of different layers of spatial data provided by GIS (Source: http://www.munispace.com/uis/index.php/services/gis) |
Really like the diagram! captures what the software aims to do and helped me personally understand its use. The rest of your blog helped me to gain further understanding of GIS, cheers Tim.
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