Conclusions

• Youth organizations are more likely to be within the boundaries of the buffer zones.
• Religious centers and cultural centers are also more likely, however, this could be because most child-friendly areas (schools) are within some sort of urban area/town/city
• parks and gardens are not geared toward children; they are more location-based

Map 5 (final) - zoomed in

This is a zoomed in version of our final map.
Keys can be found with the previous post.

Map 5 (final)

This is our final map including legend, scale, etc. We changed the map's colors in order to see each individual data point more clearly as well as the colors of the parks and gardens and cultural center polygons to help make them more defined.

Map 4

This was the next stage of our map. We clipped and removed all religious centers, youth organizations, cultural centers, and parks and gardens outside of the child friendly zones.

Map 3

At this point we merged the location data of all schools within the same zip code as a way to condense the data.

Map 2

We determined that the child friendly zones would be up to 3 miles surrounding each school, however many schools were so close to each other that the zones were too clustered to exclude any particular places.
We removed urban clusters at this stage since it was irrelevant to our pilot study. 
Parks and gardens were also included at this stage since we determined that they had the potential to be child friendly.

Map 1

This was our initial map with raw data. The large green zone surrounding Gainesville is a "urban zone" as classified by Alachua County. Every individual school, youth organization, cultural center, and religious center is seen on this map. Parks and gardens of the county were not included at this stage.
Next we plan on determining "child friendly" zones in the county.

Data information

We used the following data in our maps:

-         Cultural Centers: include aquariums and zoological facilities, arboreta and botanical gardens, dinner theaters, drive-ins, historical places and services, libraries, movie theaters, museums and art galleries, performing arts centers, planetariums, studies and art galleries and theater producers’ stage facilities. We chose to include this data in our map because we thought that children would enjoy going to these facilities.

-          Youth Organizations: Child and youth services provide a location for children to be active. They were included in our data because of that and because they are a safe place for children to go with or without their parents or guardians.

-          Religious Centers: are a combination of churches, temples, synagogues, mosques, chapels, centers and other types of religious facilities. We feel that some children will be involved in their religion, and these places also provide a safe place for children to go.

-          Parks and gardens: these areas provide a place for enjoyment of recreation, natural resources, and leisurely activities. Parks range in size and locality from common neighborhood parks to regional parks. These areas provide places children can go with their family and friends.

-          Roads and bike paths: we included these in our maps to help determine ease of access. We assume that there is no bias of use of roads and paths according to externalities.

-          Lakes: we included these to help the audience read the map and get a sense of orientation

Assumptions: 
-           Children use roads and bike paths without bias
-           Children stay around schools to find stuff to do or places to go.
-           Guardians of the children assume all amenities are child-friendly.
-           Children use amenities without bias.

In the beginning...

For our project we selected to analyze the availability and accessibility of civic and other amenities.  We chose to look at the “friendliness” of cultural centers, youth organizations, religious centers, roads, bike paths, parks and gardens, and lakes to elementary through high school students.  We defined a "child" as a person between ages 5 and 18 years old. Friendliness is defined by how far away amenities are from the schools.  We determined that a friendly walking distance is one mile, a friendly biking distance is 2 miles, and a friendly driving distance is 3 miles.  Our ultimate goal is to compare the friendliness of amenities in comparison to where schools are located. 

Intro

Hey you guys this is our blog for our final project! We decided to go with the data manipulation and see how friendly a place Alachua county is by comparing the availability and amenities in urban and rural areas. If you wanna post your ideas from the email here so that we have them all in one place that would be great!