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Looking for cities in Arizona especially I'd like to have them with that has population attributes. I've checked Arizona's geospatial websites and none of them I have found.

Does anyone know where I can find them ?

4 Answers 4

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What about using the TIGER/Line Files consolidated by city? LINK They are available by state. FTP is blocked at my current location so I can not link you closer to the actual data.

Alternatively you could use the census block line files and simply aggregate all of the census blocks into whatever unit you liked. I am assuming that the census blocks follow the city boundaries, which they may or may not.

Not sure how to get links into comments so the edit is in response to the first questions:

It depends on what type of analysis you are looking to do with the data, but in general, polygon to point should not be an issue. ArcMap (Info) has a feature to point tool. Alternatively, ET Geowizards (free functionality) can handle this.

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  • I forgot to mention the above is that I rather them to be in point. Would oonvert the polygons to point be a problem ?
    – PROBERT
    May 8, 2012 at 14:29
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GeoNames will probably be useful. It offers three different Cities datasets as text files. The most detailed includes cities that have population of at least 1,000 or are the seats of an administrative division (e.g. local capitals). Each record includes population and have a single coordinate-pair, so they are easily imported as points.

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Look into the National Historical Geographic Information System; it is an excellent resource to access contemporary and historical Census demographic and geographic data. You can get any Census enumeration unit you want and select any number of demographic attributes that are easily merged in. I imagine you'll want the Census-designated places file.

The data are available as polygons, which you can convert using Feature to Point with an ArcInfo license; however if you aren't licensed for ArcInfo there are many scripted solutions floating around the web to do this. I use this script, others may have different solutions:

import arcpy, os
from arcpy import env
workspace = "Your workspace here"
env.workspace = workspace
inputfc = arcpy.MakeFeatureLayer_management("Your polygon fc here")
projection = "Path to the projection you want here"


arcpy.AddField_management(inputfc, "X", "DOUBLE")
arcpy.AddField_management(inputfc, "Y", "DOUBLE")
rows = arcpy.UpdateCursor(inputfc, "", projection)
for row in rows:
    feat = row.getValue("shape")
    cent = feat.centroid
    row.X = cent.X
    row.Y = cent.Y
    rows.updateRow(row)

del row, rows

env.workspace = "in_memory"

outtable = "temp"
xylyr = "xylyr"
arcpy.CopyRows_management(inputfc, outtable)
arcpy.MakeXYEventLayer_management(outtable, "X", "Y", xylyr, projection)

outname = "points"
outfc = os.path.join(workspace, outname)
arcpy.CopyFeatures_management(xylyr, outfc)
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Rather than going through Census 2010 data you can see here:

Arizona cities

an database of 2000-2009 population of Arizona cities. Than you can download from here the urban areas of US and extract only Arizona urban areas. Then you can join the table with the shape in SAGA or QuantumGIS.

Cheers,

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