I have a map of the UK which splits the whole country into 1km polygon squares. Each polygon contains data, and I want to try and group the squares into local authority level.
I have tried overlaying a map and using a spatial join, however this has lots of double counting since the squares on the boundary are counted on both sides.
So I was wondering if there was an alternative method for doing this?
If all you want is to have each 1km square assigned to exactly one local authority, you could use the polygon centroids in your spatial join. This may not be an ideal method depending on the data you're dealing with and the what you're using the results for, however.
In Arc, that's Toolbox > Data Management Tools > Features > Feature to Point. Select your 1 km squares as your imput and run it. The resulting points layer will retain the attributes of the polygons, but can't be double-counted when you run a spatial join.
