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Digital Urban Renewal Area Maps
NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development

Description

The City of New York maintains maps, data, and associated products for 125 Urban Renewal Areas (URAs). These areas have been designated over the past four decades and are maintained by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD). The URAs are an important and rich dataset for HPD but because the maps were originally in linen and mylar format, it was impossible to perform complex planning and analysis with the wealth of NYC GIS data and HPD operational data. In addition, it was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain the linen and mylar based maps in a hand drafting environment.

HPD recognized the necessity of incorporating the URA maps into their Geodatabase environment and contracted with Bowne Management Systems, Inc. to:

	Design a data model that is compliant with HPD’s Oracle based Geodatabase environment.
	Develop a rules-based structure that accommodates the definition of each URA project as well as the specific sites and land use within each URA. Because the maps were developed over four decades, the definition of site usage is not standardized or uniform.
	Working with HPD’s mapping staff, perform on-site scanning of over 250 maps with a high resolution scanner.
	Deliver both georeferenced TIFFs and Encapsulated Postscript Files (EPS) to HPD. The URA maps were georeferenced using NYCMAP planimetric features.
	Using both automated and manual techniques, digitize the project boundaries and sites within each URA. The attribute definition was guided by the rules-based domain established early in the project.
	Work with HPD’s GIS Unit to load the URA project and site polygons into their Enterprise Geodatabase environment and to load the georeferenced TIFFs into an Oracle-based raster catalog.