Both a textbook for GIS classes in urban planning and a workbook for local governments, this book shows how to do real tasks that are required when a city decides to go digital and use geographic information systems (GIS) to store and access information. With this book, planners, analysts, and other local government staff use data from a real city to perform tasks such as creating buildings and parcels, setting coordinate systems, and building geodatabase topology. After creating a geodatabase, working with attribute data, and geocoding data, planners will be able to perform spatial analysis to find possible drug houses near playgrounds, find buildable vacant lots, produce land use reports, and more. With these exercises users will understand the power and the problems associated with working with real data in a GIS and be able to use ArcGIS software to address issues of importance to cities and counties.