Dissolving polygons by attribute and in a certain distance (ArcGIS)

Question

in a FeatureClass I have a lot of polygons which contain attributes of different landuse-types. Now I am trying to dissolve those polygons of the same landuse-type, but only if the distance between them is less than 100m. I'm trying this with ArcGis/ArcInfo/Version 10.

Thanks a lot for suggestions!

Answer 1

You can do this in a few steps in ArcGIS.

1. Perform a Select By Attribute to select all features with a specific land use type (e.g. residential).
2. Perform a Select By Location on the previous selection with a 100m tolerance specified.
3. Run the Dissolve tool on the final selection.

This can be done manually if you only have a few land use types, or you could use the model builder.

Answer 2

I found a solution, it's not the best, because it's a little bit complicated but in the modelbuilder, it will work: 1. Aggregte Polygons tool with a distance tolerance of 100m. 2. Spatial Join (one to many; within) to associate the aggregated polygon IDs with their input polygons. 3. Dissolve based on the JOIN_FID (=Aggregate ID) to dissolve the input polygons by the aggregated polygon IDs (Multipart). 4. ... for every landuse type.

Perhaps there are better solutions, are there?