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GRAD SCHOOL GIS PROJECTS

Stockton Emergency Food Access

Intro to GIS | Spring 2012 | Group Project

 

Since the advent of the recession and the rupture of the housing bubble, Stockton, California has experienced soaring rates of foreclosure and unemployment. A formerly vital suburb of single family homes, 1 in 10 houses in Stockton were in foreclosure at the height of the crisis, the highest rate in the nation. Stockton’s emergency food providers have been struggling to grapple with a vast increase in demand as a result of the economic downturn. Over 30% of adults in San Joaquin county now reside in food insecure households. 

 

Our team’s research goals for this project were to use GIS to answer the following questions:

1. How accessible are Stockton’s current emergency food providers to the city as a whole based on driving distance?

2. What would be the best location for a new emergency food provider to serve neighborhoods in need?

 

We conducted a network analysis to assess which areas of Stockton are most under-served in terms of access to emergency food providers, and a suitability analysis to determine opportunity sites for additional emergency food provision facilities.

Footprint Maker
Advanced GIS | Spring 2013 | Group Project​​
 

The purpose of this project was to create a tool that would easily enable the creation of building footprint data via crowd- sourcing. Building footprint data can be used for many different GIS applications, and can include many different fields or attributes, such as those relating to land use data, parcel size, and property value; we approached the task as urban designers most interested in the three-dimensional graphical representation of GIS footprint data. That is, we placed the most value on building a tool that would easily enable a variety of users to build footprints with the key attributes such as building height and land use that would be of best use to planners working with GIS data and applications.

 

Data collection is intensive, and so a tool that could enable GIS users to collect and submit basic footprint data was the goal of this project. We sought to create a simple online application that would enable users all over the Bay Area to digitize building footprints and add building attribute information, to begin to fill in the gaps in GIS data coverage that exist today. The simple tool we created, “Footprint Maker,” is now live and can be used by anyone to build footprint data.

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