GIS location-allocation models in improving accessibility to primary schools in Mansura city-Egypt

Abstract

Egypt governmental reports shows non-optimal geographical distribution of educational facilities and the difficulty in reaching school locations leads to high rates of early school drop-out. Reports showed that 2.75% of school dropout in Mansura city-Egypt (the case study) was due to spatial factors related to the difficulty of reaching school. Urban Planning Authority's report endorse that, the primary school location and the residential building must range between 500–750 m. However, such recommendations failed to take into attention or abided by a developing country like Egypt. The study goes through two Scenarios: (i) Scenario No. 1. Evaluating current school locations and (ii) Scenario No. 2. Analyzing proposed school locations and assess accessibility effectiveness after the process of schools’ geographical redistribution, it was carried out using GIS environment. The study objectives are about examined the role of spatial modeling and location analysis for improving the accessibility to public primary schools in Egypt: The specific aim of the study (i) Showing geographic distribution of public primary Schools in Mansura city. (ii) Examining the accessibility to Public Primary Schools in Mansura city and (iii) Using GIS tools to propose optimum locations where future public primary schools ought to be located. The study manipulated location-allocation models in GIS being one of the location analyses tools. It supports the process of spatial decision-making through several models and various scenarios. These provides varied options and great flexibility during planning. For analyzing the current situation of primary schools' distribution, GIS spatial analysis tools were used such as: Average Nearest Neighbor, Hotspot analysis and Grouping analysis. Study results concluded that number of demand points exceeds the distance of arrival at the optimal standard was about 54.96%. Schools concentration ratio in the city was 71.74% fell to 19.77% after the process of geographical redistribution of school locations. The proposed map of primary school locations in Mansura city can give a clear view for the decision maker on what location-allocation models can contribute for improving accessibility to educational facilities through applying the reliable standards.