Lab 4: Digitizing

Lab 3: Geocoding

In this week’s lab, I investigated the spatial relationship between the headquarters of green businesses (i.e. alternative energy companies and environmental consultants) and green finance companies. I hypothesized that green businesses would tend to develop in clusters around these finance centers. For example, northern California has a high concentration of green jobs compared to the rest of the state because of many venture capital firms that are willing to finance them in the Palo Alto/Silicon Valley area. I was expecting to find similar results in Los Angeles.

I used ESRI’s web service data service to obtain the local street information as well as a world street map. Using a list of companies interested in the UCLA green jobs career fair, I researched the addresses for forty direct providers of environmental services/products and ten companies that provided capital for clean technologies. These addresses were then plotted using ArcMap. The red stars represent environmental service/product providers and the green triangles represent finance companies.

My results show that the companies that finance green projects are based in a tightly knit clusters in Santa Monica. While this may be a result of a small sample size, I think it could also be caused by existing financial firms in the region as well as the region's environmentally conscious demographics. In contrast, the headquarters of the direct providers of environmental goods and services are much more geographically diverse. However, the vast majority of these businesses are found east of Los Angeles’ downtown. This likely reflects the fact that current buyers of green products/services are located in high income communities.

ArcMap's geocoding tools were useful in this analysis because it helped visualize spatial data quickly and seamlessly.

My data table can be found here.

Lab 2: Water Treatment Plant

Water

Lab 1: ArcGIS Review