Internship Blog 2: GIS Job Search

When looking on the City of Richmond jobs website, I found a posting for Planner - Equitable Development (https://www.governmentjobs.com/careers/richmond/jobs/4154375/planner-equitable-development?keywords=plan&pagetype=jobOpportunitiesJobs ). This position develops neighborhood and redevelopment plans, analyzes and presents data with ArcGIS and other applications, reviews budgets, and amends zoning and other city codes. The minimum qualifications listed are a bachelor's degree in urban planning, civil or environmental engineering, landscape architecture, etc. and three years of experience, although a combination of training and experience can be used to meet these qualifications. ArcGIS Pro is a preferred qualification, along with a master's degree and a certification as a planner. I would have to work in my current job for a few years in order to meet these qualifications, and possibly take on higher-level responsibilities in my job in order to get more experience with planning. 

This job is more in line with my goal of urban planning than my current job and would allow me to have a greater top-down impact on Richmond's urban development. I really like doing sidewalk site visits in my current job, so it isn't ideal that this job is fully office-based. However, it would definitely put me closer to the center of city government power and allow me to make bigger changes with my work. I think it's good that I'm starting with my current job, which is more granular and gives me a close-up understanding of pedestrian infrastructure, before moving up to work on bigger, more abstract plans. Last summer I met an urban planner at a family wedding who told me that the key to being a good urban planner was having a good understanding of utilities. While sidewalks aren't a utility, I think they are similar in that they are an essential but often overlooked part of urban infrastructure. I believe that building a foundational understanding of how sidewalk design choices impact how people move around their urban environments will be an asset if I choose to eventually move up to a job in planning and development.

I found some interesting maps of city sidewalks when searching ArcGIS Online. Most cities chose to represent sidewalks as line features, but some represented them as polygons that included plazas and areas surrounding buildings or metro stations that are walkable paved surfaces but not the linear pedestrian travel zones we typically think of as "sidewalk." I liked this map of the condition of Seattle sidewalk blocks: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/mapviewer/index.html?layers=d1ed5b6029aa453da8deade8e886021a . The symbology makes it easy to see which blocks are in need of sidewalk repair. 

Several years ago Richmond hired a contractor to rate the condition of every sidewalk block in detail, but their ratings were not very consistent, and as far as I know that data was never translated into a map or analyzed with GIS. However, once the LIDAR survey of every block is completed, I could suggest to my supervisor that we create a map like this. It would be useful to have one GIS map to look up every piece of information about a sidewalk that we might need, such as length and width, material, condition, dates of previous small maintenance or full-block repairs, priority based on pedestrian volume and proximity to certain areas and institutions, if we've planned a future full-block repair, what council district it's in, pictures of damage, etc. Currently if I want to know if we've repaired a block or if we have a repair plan, I have to check multiple folders and spreadsheets, so there's definitely a need for a comprehensive sidewalk map!