The Confluence Project is a private and publically funded project with goals to develop a 150,000 square foot community arts center that will be used for both fine arts performances and university students in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Additionally, a separate building will include a large commercial retail center and an apartment complex that is available for university students to rent. Outdoors, a public plaza will be built that will include public bike paths. The project in total is expected to cost about $80 million and continues to receive support by state government officials and community voters. The community arts center is estimated to cost $50 million, and the mixed use privately owned center will cost about $28 million.
To make informed development decisions and to inform the public of the development plans, it is important to make the information about the proposed develop sites organized and readily available for any interested party. Here, all known information about the area surrounding the proposed site is organized into six maps.
Methods
Using ArcMaps, I created six maps to organize known the geographic and city census data regarding the proposed site of the Confluence Project and its surrounding area. Legends and scale bars were added to all maps. The legend bars allow the reader to identify the map objects, as well as interpret data values. The scale bar is measured in mile and gives the reader a sense of the space they are observing. All feature classes were laid over a satellite image of the proposed site with Way Claire, Wisconsin. The transparency of the added feature classes was increased in order to make the satellite base image visible to the reader. Also, the world imagery was used to locate the proposed plots of land for the Confluence Project to we able to digitize the plots of land. Digitizing allowed me to create polygon features to add into each of the six maps to draw attention to the proposed site. The descriptions and methods unique to each individual map are listed below.
1) Civil Divisions Map
To make this map, the World Imagery was brought into the data frame. To focus on our area of interest, the Civil Divisions feature class of Eau Claire County was added, followed by the digitized area of the proposed site. This map of civil divisions was created to show how the civil division types are divided within the area surrounding the proposed site. The different types of civil divisions are City, Town, and Village. In my map, we are able to see the proposed site is within the City municipality.
2) Census Boundaries Map
To make this map, the World Imagery was brought into the data frame, followed by the feature classes of BlockGroups and Tracts, and the digitized proposed site. The tracts background was removed to allow the reader to see how they are broken down into smaller block groups. These block groups represent the total population of the area normalized by the square mileage. The reader is able to gather an estimate of the normalized population of the area surrounding the proposed site because a gradient of color was used to symbolize the population within each block group.
3) PLSS Features Map
Here, the World Imagery was brought into the data frame, followed by the digitized proposed site and the PLSS quarter quarter feature class. The PLSS quarter quarter data frames shows how to township is divided for public land surveying, and most importantly which survey plot the proposed area lies within.
4) EC City Parcel Data
This map was created by first adding the World Imagery to the data frame followed by the cities parcel area data, the centerline data, and the digitized proposed site. The Eau Claire City parcel data shows the division of land parcels within this area in relation to the parcels of the proposed area.
5) Zoning
For the zoning map, the World Imagery was added to the data frame along with the digitized proposed site, and zoning class data. Originally, there were 40 areas marked with their specific zone class. To organize the data in an effective way, the areas that shared a broader common zone type were grouped together. These broader zone classes are listed Commercial, Central Business District, Industry, Public Properties District, Residential, and Transportation. The reader can see that the proposed site is within a Central Business District.
6) Voting Districts
This map was created by adding the World Imagery, followed by the voting district class feature and the digitized proposed site. Each voting districts was labeled with its unique voting district number.
Results
Figure 1 below displays the Civil Divisions Map, Census Boundaries Map, PLSS Features Map, EC City Parcel Data Map, Zoning Map, and Voting Districts Map that I created during this map.
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| Figure 1: Six maps of the proposed Confluence Project site in Eau Claire, WI. Further description for each map is provided within the blog's Methods section above, under the headings that correspond to each map title. |
Sources
I collected information from the following sites for this lab:
- UWEC. (2015) Frequently asked questions: The Confluence Project. Retrieved from https://www2.uwec.edu/News/more/confluenceprojectFAQs.htm.
- UWEC. (2015) Confluence Project Flowing Forward. Retrieve from http://www.uwec.edu/news/stories/confluence-project-flowing-forward_24942
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