STEP 1

After receiving the assignment, the problem was to determine where the 300 home units would be built. The easy way is to just buy land at the best price and to build the homes there. However, current trends in community development require the scientific approach. This means that besides building the homes in the most economically effective location, the environment must be considered as well. Exactly what however, does the environment consist of? What issues should be considered in designing a community that will make it a perfect fit in the areas chosen? Additionally, what is the importance of each of the priorities? – are some more of a priority than others?

Described below are the environmental problems faced when designing a new community. These will then be described in detail as to what must be considered. They are listed alphabetically. At a later time as you will see, a priority rating was assigned to each. This was then used through the GIS to help find the "perfect" building location(s).

Although not a concern on the outset of the site selection process, other concerns must be addressed once the site has been chosen and the community planning is underway. These concerns include:

STEP 2

After the priorities have been identified, each priority category must be assessed against an arbitrary scale. We chose a 1-10 scale with 10 being the most important and 1 being the least.

Factors exist that may change what we felt were important influences at the start but later we had changed our opinions. An example would be septic systems. Percolation was a major concern at the start. However, after learning that there are now compact sewage disposal systems available for low density housing or that financial assistance to build sewer treatment plants is available through the Clean Water Act, the concerns can be mitigated and are no longer a top priority.

An equation to complete a mathematical model of the "ideal" location is then written within the system. When requested to create this theme, the GIS almost instantaneously sorted the information from all of the other themes, assigned a value to each piece of property and then created a graduated color map of these priorities. This map then was revised to increase intervals so that subtleties could be looked at more carefully.

Once this layer was created, it was then superpositioned on to aerial photographs of the township. There is also a layer that shows property line layers, land use (again based on the Anderson Classification System) and roads. This enabled us to locate favorable properties and to look at these areas with a more learned eye. By viewing these properties on the various layers that the best possible sites layer created, we could eliminate questions and find the best sites.

After a site was chosen, we would create a polygon of the proposed tract. The GIS was able to calculate size and acreage. With a number of possible sites in hand, we were now able to look at these and decided where to propose that the project gets built.