Cuyahoga County Geojson Integration Project

Project Overview

This notebook creates a unified spatial dataset of Cuyahoga County municipalities and Cleveland SPA neighborhoods.

Key outcomes

Merge county municipal boundaries and Cleveland Strategic Planning Areas (SPAs) into one dataset.
Label geographies as Cleveland Core vs Cuyahoga Suburban.
Produce clean visualizations and export final data for GIS tools and Tableau.

Outputs

cuyahoga.geojson — Simplified Cuyahoga municipal boundaries (standardized columns).
cuyahoga_neighborhoods.geojson — Unified Cleveland + suburban boundaries.
cuyahoga_neighborhoods_df.xlsx — Geometry-free table for Tableau/Excel.

Imports & Load GeoJSON Files — Read spatial layers into GeoDataFrames

import geopandas as gpd
import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

# Load spatial layers (adjust paths if needed)
cuyahoga = gpd.read_file('Cuyahoga_Municipal_Boundaries.geojson')
cleveland = gpd.read_file('Cleveland_SPA_Neighborhoods.geojson')

Explore County & Cleveland SPA Data — Preview attributes

cuyahoga.head()  # preview cuyahoga map

cleveland.head() # preview cleveland map

Inspect Columns — Confirm schemas for a clean merge

print("Cuyahoga columns:", list(cuyahoga.columns))
print("Cleveland columns:", list(cleveland.columns))

Visualize Cuyahoga — County municipal map

ax = cuyahoga.plot(figsize=(10, 10), edgecolor='k', color='lightgrey')
ax.set_title('Cuyahoga County — Municipal Boundaries')
plt.show()

Prepare Simplified Cuyahoga — Rename, add labels for MetroRegion/County

This step filters the Cuyahoga County GeoDataFrame to include only the municipality name and geometry columns, renaming MUNI_NAME to SPANM for consistency with the Cleveland dataset. It then adds two new fields — MetroRegion, labeling “Cleveland” as Cleveland Core and all other municipalities as Cuyahoga Suburban — and County, which is set to “Cuyahoga” for all records.

# Keep only name + geometry; standardize column name to SPANM to match Cleveland
cuyahoga2 = cuyahoga[['MUNI_NAME', 'geometry']].rename(columns={'MUNI_NAME':'SPANM'})

# Label Cleveland vs Suburban (Cleveland = Cleveland Core; all else = Cuyahoga Suburban)
cuyahoga2 = cuyahoga2.assign(
    MetroRegion=cuyahoga2['SPANM'].apply(lambda muni: 'Cleveland Core' if muni == 'Cleveland' else 'Cuyahoga Suburban'),
    County='Cuyahoga'
)

cuyahoga2.head()

Export Simplified County Layer — GeoJSON for reuse

cuyahoga2.to_file("cuyahoga.geojson", driver="GeoJSON")
"Exported: cuyahoga.geojson"

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