Philadelphia Neighborhoods by Building Footprint Map

For day 3 of the #30DayMapChallenge, I was tasked with mapping polygons and immediately thought of a Neighborhoods Map of Lancaster, Pennsylvania that I had made a few years ago. In that map, I incorporated building footprint polygons for the City of Lancaster, then overlaid the city’s neighborhood boundaries polygon and added an attribute value in the buildings footprint dataset that corresponded to a building’s neighborhood. I then color-coded each building to its corresponding neighborhood with the effect of providing a detailed-looking neighborhoods map. It was a fun project to work on and since I first did it, I have been wanting to try it on other cities.

For today’s map, I decided to follow the same approach for Philadelphia, a vibrant, beautiful North American city I used to call home and a city that remains special to me. If you haven’t visited, Philadelphia is known as “A City of Neighborhoods”. I think this moniker is accurate and would similarly describe Philly as an interwoven patchwork of inter-connected and inter-dependent neighborhoods with each community having its own distinct feel and thing that makes it special.

Approach

Each of the city’s communities have something beautiful and unique about them, and I wanted to capture that in this map. For my color scheme, I landed on incorporating vibrant color scheme to match the city’s vivid, if at times charmingly gritty and blunt, beauty. I also wanted to incorporate an element of nostalgia and decided to go with Sarah Bell’s High Alpine serif font, which I love working with. Her bespoke font style reminds me of something vaguely modern, but in a classic kind of way, and it’s gorgeous. You can support her work and incorporate High Alpine into your work by purchasing a commercial or personal use license over at SarahBellMaps.com  

For making my map, I was able to access building footprint and neighborhood polygon shapefiles from www.opendataphilly.org, which serves as the region’s open data clearinghouse. From there, I used ArcGIS Pro’s spatial join function to identify each building polygon’s corresponding neighborhood. I also incorporated a polygon National Wetland Inventory (NWI) dataset for Pennsylvania and clipped it to the city’s boundary, primarily to highlight the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers, which feature prominently in the city’s layout and design. I used John Nelson’s wonderful watercolor style to symbolize the water. I also added in railroad, road and pedestrian bridges and used a thick white symbology to show the bridges that connect the city (it’s a small detail, but I think it works). Finally, I fired up ArcGIS Pro’s label engine and incorporated the High Alpine font to provide neighborhood details. Below is my resulting map.