6. Close to Center City Walk to Grocery Store Nearby Restaurants Library Near a Park Biking / walking distance from our work Biking distance to fencing club somewhat important vital very important nice to have somewhat important very important somewhat important Robert’s Rules of Housing
66. GPUs, Clouds and Grids: Distributed Geoprocessing for Speed, Scalability and Better Living Robert Cheetham 17 February 2011 NC GIS 2011
Editor's Notes
So this story starts with my wife and I looking for a house and being frustrated by the type of information we had access to. We didn't know where to start. Each of the real estate agents we met knew a particular part of the city really well, so they tended to steer us toward those houses.
We didn't own a car, so we wanted to find a place that was * Close to Center City (somewhat important) * Walking distance to a grocery store (vital) * Near some restaurants (very important) * Walk to a library (nice to have) * Near a Park (yes!) * Close to fencing * Biking / walking distance from our work
The factors you consider important are probably not the same as ours. Maybe yours are related to child care or rankings for local schools or being near a farmer's market. Or maybe you want to be close to PhillyCarShare or public transit, but don't want to be too close to downtown.
We selected a variety of factors that contribute to sustainability, ranging from location in a state or federal tax incentive zone to environmental amenities like tree canopy to transit considerations like access to bus and regional rail lines. Retail businesses targeting markets may be interested in demographic factors like age and per capita income and proxies for environmental engagement like recycling participation.
Many of the ideas here are not new. Actually, they were developed here in Philadelphia by Ian McHarg, who was chair of the Landscape Architecture and Regional Planing department at the University of Pennsylvania
He wrote a book in 1969 called Design with Nature, and focused on sustainable and ecological design. Among other concepts, he described how a series of inputs drawn on transparent acetate sheets. Could be combined as a set of map overlays to identify the best site for a particular facility, road or whatever.
Now fast forward to the 1990’s. We’re interested in digital maps. This approach to compositing several digital maps was developed further by Dana Tomlin, who is now also a professor at University of Pennsylvania. Tomlin developed the computational vocabulary to perform this type of work – he called it Map Algebra. He’s also a really great teacher, so if you ever get a chance to take a class with him. Do it. He’s great.
So, these days people do this kind of work using desktop GIS systems. You are looking at the ArcMap application from ESRI