Concept
This mapping project visualizes the six major iterations of Lexington’s Urban Service Area, which was established in 1958 as the first urban growth boundary in the United States. The Urban Service Area is a socially, politically, and economically contentious issue in Lexington as it determines which areas within Lexington/Fayette County are eligible to receive city services (sewage, trash collection, street lights, etc.), and are able to be zoned for development.
My interest in making this map stems from my interest in the multiple discourses around the Urban Service Area boundary. Anecdotally, I know that many residents are unaware of the Urban Service Area and its importance to Lexington’s landscape(s), while other residents (and miscellaneous stakeholders) are deeply invested in how the boundary may or may not shift. Every five years, the city considers changing the boundary, and whether or not to expand it considerably dominates many of these conversations. However, while expanding the Urban Service Area is most common, there are instances of the boundary retracting, in some cases significantly. This came as a surprise to me when I started researching this topic, because narratives around urban growth boundaries in the United States usually center around expansion deliberation, typically in regard to the real estate market and environmental conservation. While these themes are relevant here, Lexington/Fayette County’s retracted Urban Service areas, particularly a sizable area northeast of the city center, bring forth questions around intent, benefit, and relationships, specific to Lexington/Fayette County’s political economy. In particular, the region’s thoroughbred horse industry seems to play a major role.
To begin to hint at some of these complexities, this interactive web map of the Urban Service Area throughout the years allows the user to toggle layers on/off to see both expansion and retraction of the boundary. I believe this is crucial to a deeper understanding of the Urban Service Area’s purposes and impacts. While on the surface the boundary is often discussed as a simple environmental conservation tool, looking at where the boundary has shifted and wondering why, complicates this understanding. I want this map to encourage the viewer to investigate areas of Lexington/Fayette County that they are interested in to see if, when, and/or how the Urban Service Area has been impactful to both specific portions of land and the regional scale. By toggling layers on and off, the user can see where the boundaries have been dictated over the past several decades. By layering aerial imagery underneath the semi-transparent Urban Service Area polygons, the user can visually see how development or non-development has altered the physical landscape.
Polygon layers also include pop-ups stating the number of acres inside the Urban Service Area based on the year of boundary change and the percent of Lexington/Fayette County’s total acres that the area comprises. This is important. The percentage of Lexington/Fayette County inside the urban service boundary has mostly changed a very small amount in terms of how much land is within the Urban Service Area to how much land is outside of it, in the Rural Service Area. See the table below.
| layer |
acres |
percent of Lexington/Fayette County's total area |
| Urban Service Area 1996 |
54,282 acres |
30% |
| Urban Service Area 1980 |
48,679 acres |
27% |
| Urban Service Area 1967 |
48,018 acres |
26% |
| Urban Service Area 1964 |
57,037 acres |
31% |
| Urban Service Area 1962 |
42,128 acres |
23% |
| Urban Service Area 1958 |
40,833 acres |
22% |
| Lexington/Fayette County |
182,766 acres |
100% |
However, I expect that the significance of these changes, and of the Urban Service Area itself both broadly and generally, will vary user to user, perhaps based on factors like personal connection to specific (or general) parts of Lexington/Fayette County, place of residence, income level, political orientation, or workplace industry. It is not my intention to convince the viewer that the Urban Service Area is “good” or “bad” or that it “should be expanded” or “shouldn’t be expanded”. Rather, I want the user’s interest in the Urban Service Area to be piqued and for them to consider that there might be more to the Urban Service Area than they had been previously considered or been aware of.
Process
This map was created with QGIS, qgis2web, and HTML. The repository is hosted on GitHub to provide public access. Data was collected from Lexington's Data Hub.
To create this map, I imported the Urban Service Area layers and Lexington/Fayette County polygon layer into QGIS and ordered them with most recent boundary iteration on top. Underneath these layers three Esri basemaps are included to provide place names and aerial imagery or a simple grey vector tile layer per user choice. Urban Service Area layers were stylized to be semi-opaque and mapped to Fabio Crameri's davos sequential color scheme.
Urban Service Area layers were edited to include new fields $percent_of_lexington_area, $urban-service-area_acres, $year, and $name. The Lexington/Fayette County layer was edited to include new fields $area_acres, $percent_of_lexington_area, and $name. I input the corresponding values manually for each of these layers before giving the new fields aliases to improve their legibility in the map's informational pop-ups. I also added attributions with links to the layers downloaded from Lexington's Data Hub.
Next, qgis2web built the web map's skeleton before I edited the HTML manually to bring uniformity to layer pop-ups and make some other small tweaks.
Findings
Technical findings
This project strengthened my web mapping skills in a variety of ways. First, this is my first successful use of the qgis2web plugin, which I have struggled with immensely (and consequentially) in the past. But, I was determined to use this plugin as it can build an interactive web map, crucial for this project. Until now, my elementary knowledge and experience with web mapping has only supported building zoomable XYZ tiles maps, which would be inappropriate for this project both visually and conceptually. Through much trial and error, I found that the qgis2web plugin works best with layers loaded into QGIS as .geojson files. When the same layers were downloaded from the source and imported as .geopackage files, the qgis2web plugin did not write them, and I ended up with only my base maps rendered.
qgis2web offers three services for map creation: OpenLayers, Leaflet, and Mapbox GL JS. All seem to have their strengths and drawbacks. I selected the Leaflet service because of its ability to embed an informational abstract to the map.
As compared to other work on the same topic
This web map is part of a broader interest in researching Lexington’s Urban Service Area and was largely inspired by a narrative map on the same topic I created earlier this year. While both maps were created to be informative visualizations of Lexington's Urban Service Area, they go about demonstrating the change in boundary iterations in different ways. The linked narrative map visualizes the shapes of Urban Service Area expansion and retraction on top of layered photographs of the bluegrass region's farmland, hinting more at the boundary's impacts on, or threats to, agricultural areas. The interactive web map takes a different approach by focusing on urban development, which I believe is especially highlighted by built environment aerial imagery underneath the translucent Urban Service Area layers.
User response
As an interactive web map designed to be approachable and informative to Lexington folks with a spectrum of knowledge on the Urban Service Area topic, this map requires user response to ascertain its success and value. Unfortunately, assessing user response on any significant scale was outside of my abilities for this particular project, but I did share drafts of the web map with some friends for feedback and response.
One Lexington resident who had no prior knowledge of the Urban Service Area reported that examining the Urban Service Area-Rural Service Area borders helped him to visualize Lexington's development, but he was curious to learn more about the city's history prior to the urban growth boundary's establishment. This user found the areas closest to the Urban Service Area's boundaries most fascinating and asked about the perceptions of residents who live close to, and outside the boundary. I am interested in this as well, and hope to include this question in future research.
Another user thought the map's pop-ups could include more information, but wasn't sure specifically what other facts about the Urban Service Area layer would be helpful. I designed this map with brevity in mind, mostly thinking it would add appeal to users with limited interest in the Urban Service Area, but perhaps I underestimated what users want to see. This leaves room for future projects to better consider user interactive design and what people find interesting about this and similar maps.