UTC GIS Director Charlie Mix won a Cartography Special Interest Group Excellence Award for “A 21st Century Park System for Chattanooga, Tennessee” at the 2023 Esri User Conference
Charlie Mix, the geographic information system director for the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga’s Interdisciplinary Geospatial Technology Lab (IGTLab), was the recipient of a Cartography Special Interest Group Excellence Award for “A 21st Century Park System for Chattanooga, Tennessee” at the recent 2023 Esri User Conference—one of two awards won by the IGTLab.
Esri, an international supplier of geographic information system software, web GIS and geodatabase management applications, annually holds a user conference.
This year’s event had more than 18,000 attendees.
Mr. Mix recalled getting tasked with “a tall order” earlier this year when he met with Chattanooga Parks and Outdoors Administrator Scott Martin about a map for the city agency’s new plan—which aims to have all residents capable of walking to a park or some open space within 10 minutes. It also seeks to connect residents and park visitors with the natural ecosystem that Chattanooga sits within.
“His exact request was, ‘Can you make a map for our parks plan that people will be inspired by 100 years from now the same way that we are at the Nolen map?’” Mr. Mix said. “So I was like, ‘That’s a tall order.’ And then I was like, ‘Let me just use that for inspiration.’”
That inspiration—landscape architect John Nolen’s 1911 “General Features of a Park System for Chattanooga, Tennessee”—was turned into an award-winning map.
“John Nolen drafted a parks plan in 1911 that established many of the parks that we see today in Chattanooga,” Mr. Mix explained, “so this is seen as the next iteration of Chattanooga’s park system—a very visionary, aspirational parks plan.”
Mr. Nolen studied under noted landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, the co-designer of New York’s Central Park.
“So I took Nolen’s hand-drawn map and used his color palette and applied that using modern 21st-century cartography techniques,” Mr. Mix continued. “That’s where the inspiration for that map came from, paying a nod to our history while looking forward to the future.
“All the data in there was collected, analyzed and processed through spatial data science.”
The parks plan map wasn’t the only UTC award winner coming out of the Esri competition.
“A City of Trees: Assessing Urban Tree Canopy with GIS and Remote Sensing for Chattanooga, Tennessee” earned second-place accolades in the Communicating Science Spatially category. The map was authored by Mix, Assistant GIS Director Nyssa Hunt, recent UTC graduate Will Stuart (the recipient of a master’s in environmental science), and Biology, Geology and Environmental Science Associate Professor Azad Hossain.