The 2001 Land-use Inventory, published in 2007, is the product of more than three years’ effort to present an accurate snapshot of land use in the six-county region around Chicago. The inventory was created using 2001 digital aerial photography, supplemented with data from numerous government and private-sector sources. 
The land-use inventory is summarized by the Data Bulletin report (16MB PDF). This document has four parts: A quantification of acreage by land use category by various political divisions within the region; a summary of land use change within the region between 1990 and 2001; a map gallery; and an overview of how the 2001 Land-use Inventory was produced. There is also an appendix giving a complete description of all the land-use categories used in the inventory.
To obtain the land-use inventory GIS database in ESRI shapefile format, please contact David Clark at (312) 386-8682. The inventory is an essential input for CMAP's own plans and research regarding land use and transportation. Other users of the data include:
- County planning departments
- Regional transportation agencies
- Federal & State agencies (Army Corps of Engineers, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, Illinois State Water Survey)
- University researchers
- Non-governmental organizations (Center for Neighborhood Technology, McGraw Wildlife Foundation, MCIC, the Conservation Foundation)
- Real estate developers
The forecasting community focuses on broad land-use categories, but local officials, planners, and non-profit organizations can also benefit from having the data available at a greater level of detail. A deeper understanding is desirable both in terms of information (“single-family” and multi-family,” as opposed to simply “residential”) and spatial resolution (acres instead of quarter-sections). CMAP's land-use inventory aims to fulfill these higher expectations.
Among the key findings:
- Of the 1,650 square miles of the region occupied by some sort of Urbanized land use, two thirds of that area is taken up by Residential land use
- Between 1990-2001, 7.4 percent of the region was converted from an “undeveloped” state to another use
- All five collar counties actively added to their existing forest preserve/conservation district holdings