{"id":775548,"date":"2026-11-01T18:59:36","date_gmt":"2026-11-02T02:59:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/?post_type=arcnews&p=775548"},"modified":"2026-10-30T16:35:07","modified_gmt":"2026-10-30T23:35:07","slug":"one-map-to-put-together-the-worlds-land-use-plans","status":"publish","type":"arcnews","link":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/arcnews\/one-map-to-put-together-the-worlds-land-use-plans","title":{"rendered":"One Map to Put Together the World\u2019s Land-Use Plans"},"author":5752,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"sync_status":"","episode_type":"","audio_file":"","transcript_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","castos_file_data":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1041,476972,401],"tags":[160542,165542,237901,160642,351],"arcnews_issues":[493590],"class_list":["post-775548","arcnews","type-arcnews","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-collaboration","category-community-maps-program","category-government","tag-county-government","tag-data-sharing","tag-land-use","tag-local-government","tag-planning","arcnews_issues-november-2026","arcnews_sections-news"],"acf":{"short_description":"Land management is often disconnected between communities. OpenPlanMap, a new initiative from Esri, aims to bring these plans together.","pdf":{"host_remotely":false,"file":"","file_url":""},"flexible_content":[{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"Communities don\u2019t grow randomly. Land-use plans dictate how residential, downtown, and green spaces are designed and safeguard natural resources such as water, soil, and forests. They also prevent conflicts, like placing an industrial plant next to a quiet neighborhood, and support public infrastructure, including roads, transit, and utilities. In essence, a land-use plan foretells what an area will look like in the years and decades to come.\r\n\r\nFrom municipality to municipality, however, land-use plans are largely disconnected. A city might not have easy, mapped-out access to the county\u2019s plan, and adjacent towns could be in the dark about one another\u2019s development objectives.\r\n\r\nOpenPlanMap (OPM), the latest innovation from Esri\u2019s Community Maps Program, aims to change that. The initiative encourages planners from all over the world to share their planning documents via an Esri-managed online portal. The data\u2014originally presented in different schemas and languages\u2014is then standardized and shared via ArcGIS Living Atlas, an open data site, and a new app, where it will help reveal the collective impacts of how communities are designed, both now and in the future. This cloud-based system for community sharing and integration of land-use plans will use a crowdsourcing process to create a consistent and continuous digital map that consolidates local and regional plans from around the world. Public and private land-use planners will share, upload, and update their plans over time.\r\n\r\nToday, nearly every local and regional government around the world creates and maintains land-use plans in different digital formats. While these plans are typically shared publicly as open data and web maps, they have never been consistently brought together to form continuous land-use plan maps and datasets for regions, states, or whole nations.\r\n\r\nFor the last several years, the International Geodesign Consortium has worked closely with Esri\u2019s ArcGIS Living Atlas team to create this system. This data will be maintained by Esri as a standard set of layers. It will also be available freely to anyone.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe more communities that share their planning data, the faster it will start to mosaic,\u201d said Ryan Perkl, Esri\u2019s lead for geodesign and OPM. \u201cThen we\u2019ll be able to build this big, patchwork quilt of land use across the globe.\u201d\r\n\r\nThis goes beyond simply cataloging what exists today\u2014a common trait of land-cover mapping, according to Perkl. Instead, OPM aims to share what the land\u2019s intended use<\/em> is.\r\n\r\n\u201cA field in today\u2019s land-cover map might not remain a field. The area\u2019s land-use plan may show it becoming something else entirely\u2014a neighborhood, a business center, or an industrial zone,\u201d Perkl said. \u201cMaps depicting land use show what changes may be on the horizon\u2014a critical step in planning for the future.\u201d"},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":775549,"image_position":"left","orientation":"horizontal","hyperlink":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"Planners who submit data to OPM also receive a map-based carbon assessment of their plan that reveals how much carbon dioxide it emits or sequesters. The hope is that their communities will use this to build accountability into their land-use plans and make adjustments that could have positive long-term effects.\r\n\r\nBut OPM\u2019s multidisciplinary team has more ambitious goals. One is to eventually unite different types of data from various sources: transportation and open space plans from cities and counties, conservation plans from other government agencies, and land management plans from businesses and nongovernmental agencies. With this data, users could map and evaluate how to improve connectivity between places and develop resilient green infrastructure. This would make genuine progress toward cutting carbon emissions to levels that keep global temperature increases in check.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe idea is that we can actually spatialize climate actions,\u201d said Guoping Huang, an associate professor of spatial sciences at the University of Southern California, who helped develop one of the prototypes and serves as an advisory collaborator on the project. \u201cThat is the beauty of having a shared depository for all sorts of maps.\u201d"},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"

Bringing Planning Data into the Light<\/h2>\r\nOPM launched in July 2026, and its immediate goal is straightforward: Get planners from all over the world to submit their planning data.\r\n\r\n\u201cSome cities with advanced GIS departments might have published, map-ready planning data, but currently, a lot of it is confined to 300-page planning documents\u2014PDFs\u2014and it doesn\u2019t see the light of day,\u201d said Perkl.\r\n\r\nIn much of the planning community, it is customary to share plans publicly once they\u2019re complete. But having the data all in one place, in a standardized format, opens an exciting new world.\r\n\r\nDaniel Nairn, director of planning at the City of Bismarck, North Dakota, was not only open to submitting Bismarck\u2019s planning data\u2014he was also energized by having one place to share and discover data like this.\r\n\r\n\u201cWe can always go online and fish around on a website to find others\u2019 plans\u2014we do that already . . . to make sure we\u2019re staying in line and following industry standards,\u201d he said. \u201cBut I think having one place with a standardized format will be helpful to draw those comparisons. If OPM grows to where we can actually see the region and how the cities and other communities that are directly adjacent to us are planning, it could become a regional planning tool.\u201d\r\n\r\nThat\u2019s what Tom Vo, the principal transportation planner at the Santa Barbara County Association of Governments (SBCAG) in California, hopes OPM becomes.\r\n\r\n\u201cOPM has the potential to support our data-driven and sustainable regional planning,\u201d said Vo, who was involved in testing OPM.\r\n\r\nHe explained that the local jurisdictions SBCAG works with maintain their planning data using different formats and update schedules.\r\n\r\n\u201cOPM provides a framework that can help organize and standardize those datasets, making regional analysis more efficient,\u201d he said. \u201cBy organizing planning information in a consistent format, OPM can improve our ability to understand regional growth patterns and evaluate how adopted local plans contribute to our regional transportation and sustainability objectives.\u201d"},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"

AI Streamlines the Submission Process<\/h2>\r\nSubmitting data to OPM isn\u2019t difficult, according to those who have done it.\r\n\r\n\u201cI uploaded Bismarck\u2019s comprehensive plan as a large PDF document and then tied in the feature service for our future land-use plan,\u201d said Darrel Nucech, a GIS developer for the City of Bismarck. \u201cThe portal actually had an AI assistant to interpret everything and then compile it all for us. So it wasn\u2019t much effort on my end at all.\u201d\r\n\r\nTo submit data to OPM, users must first register with the Esri Community Maps Program<\/a>. There, the system allows organizations to upload their digital land-use plans. The system, which has been designed to accept multiple formats, automatically normalizes land-use plan classifications, different scales, and map projections before integrating the data into a continuous map layer and web map."},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":775550,"image_position":"right","orientation":"horizontal","hyperlink":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"\u201cWe had more detail than what the OPM map layers incorporate\u2014for example, we note \u2018neighborhood mixed use\u2019 areas, but OPM just groups that into \u2018residential,\u2019\u201d said Nucech. \u201cIt just broke out that classification, and I reviewed it and said, \u2018Yeah, that\u2019s fine, that would be residential.\u2019\u201d\r\n\r\nSubmitted plans feed into a hands-off processing pipeline where an extract, transform, and load (ETL) system completes the remaining steps of the workflow. From there, three primary data products are produced:\r\n