Introduction

Thank you for visiting my Geog 355 project, Potential Residential Growth in Coquitlam. I have been living in Coquitlam more than 7 years. From time to time, i saw a lot of changes in Coquitlam. No matter on commerical, institutional, or residential lands, they have been chaning to more alike a core city. By building a spatial model of viewing potential growth in residential, it may give people a brief, rough idea of how will Coquitlam be like in the near future.

Coquitlam is one of the fastest growing sub-urban city in GVRD. It does not have much commercial lands nor residential lands in 10 - 15 years ago. However, as massive immigrants from foreign countries came in to Vancouver, Lands became demanding. The urban development was spreading out from the Vancouver Downtown, to Burnaby, Surrey, then Coquitlam. Before, Coquitlam had many green spaces and mostly industrial area. Not much people were willing to live in such a rural place. It is far away from downtown, almost an hour driving. They did not want to drive so many kilometers for workig everyday. They prefer places close to their jobs. It drives the pirce of downtown's land to increase.

Since middle to low income workers cannot afford the rent or own a house in Downtown area, they start to migrate to sub-urban city, for example Coquitlam. The low living standard, cheap house's price attract many people move into Coquitlam. Not only low income workers, but also foreign immigrants prefer a sub-urban place because it is cheap and with a nice view.

Beside viewing the prediciton on residential growth in Coquitlam, i have another objective to be achieved. Since a GIS software has to be integrated in order to perform a spatial analysis, i would use two different GIS software to compare the result, plus, strength and weakness on each of them. IDRISI and ArcVIew are two common GIS software that we are using nowadays. Viewer may visit Methology section to seek a further information on those.

Hope you enjoy the tour in my project!

by Tim