I'm not exactly sure what made me think of this, but the other day as I was pondering my future internship ideas for this summer and thought back to my prior internship experiences. In the summer of 2008, I found myself working at the MPO (metropolitan planning organization) for the Grand Rapids metro area: an organization called Grand Valley Metropolitan Council. My first crack at planning was really enjoyable even though the work placed upon me wasn't terribly demanding (it was during my undergrad; they probably didn't trust me with much more). Either way, when the fall semester of my senior year at Grand Valley State rolled around, it was time to bid farewell and begin work on my thesis to graduate.
Luckily, I must've left a good impression as I was offered a job with a subsidiary organization under Metro Council called REGIS. They specialized in Geographic Information Systems and performing mapping duties for all the local municipalities in the area who chose to pay for the service.
Enough with the lengthy background. One of my first projects at REGIS was to make a land use map for the City of Hudsonville, a satellite city a few miles southwest of Grand Rapids that has taken on a largely suburban character since the 1960's. The project was very interesting and slightly challenging as well. Selecting an appropriate land use classification code can be difficult as some need to be tailored to a particular geography.
The current land use map used a classification code that seems, well, half-baked at best. The codes and the numbers didn't seem to make much sense and there was no tiering of the code--all land uses were "equal." Most classification codes are in levels as to place hierarchy on generality. For example, "Commercial" or "Residential" may be adequate enough for a particular map when discerning where businesses are or where people live; however, if you need to know where multi-family residential dwellings versus single-family residential dwelling are, you'll need a more detailed, precise classification.
Being a part of an MPO created to coordinate planning and development strategies for a large geographic area, it would make sense to have everyone using the same classification system. The system I was most used to from my undergrad experience was the State of Michigan's Land Use/Land Cover Classification System which is based off the USGS system. To use a ubiquitous system which would allow for direct comparisons temporally and spatially would be very advantageous to the MPO. For instance, a direct comparison could be made between single-family residential in Grand Rapids as Wyoming, Grandville, or any other municipality. Unfortunately when I made this request to the planning and zoning administrator of Hudsonville, he said since Hudsonville is in Ottawa County (most of the GR metro area is in Kent County), they had to be sympathetic to their efforts and use their classification system.
I'm all for decentralization, but when it comes to an issue such as this, if one area is using a code created by the county, one area is using a code they developed themselves, and everyone else is using the state's code, it just makes for ambiguities and headaches when trying to compare them. This could lead to poor planning decisions when formulating comprehensive plans for a region. Land uses need to be clearly defined as to ensure each class or subclass is expressing the same thing. High-density in Grand Rapids probably means something very different than high-density in Byron Township. This sort of leads into descriptive statistics and being able to use quantitative data to describe the character or changing character of a community.
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