Social Stratification and Spatial Equity of Educational Facilities in a Complex Urban Core in Lanzhou, China

Abstract

Spatially equitable educational facilities play an important role in narrowing the gap between social strata. This paper, taking the example of Lanzhou, aims to classify households into different social strata by the hierarchical cluster method and analyze their spatial feature to identify the strata attributes of the community and calculate the spatial equity of educational facilities within different strata by constructing a fairness index model. We verify the positive correlation between social stratification level and educational equity, which has been largely ignored in previous studies based on basic education facilities. The results indicate that the spatial differentiation trend of social strata in Lanzhou shows that a circle structure of the center belongs to the upper social stratum and the marginal areas belong to the lower social stratum. Urban villages in the urban fringe are an important area of social stratum differentiation. Different social strata have significant differences in terms of access to educational facilities. The spatial fairness of educational facilities from high to low is the wealthy and the elite class (WEC), the middle class (MC), the low class (LC), and the lower class (LEC). The higher the social class level is, the greater the equity difference. The lower the social class is, the smaller the difference. The equity of educational facilities within the WEC and the MC is obviously better than that of the LC and the LEC. The spatial distribution of educational facilities among social strata is unfair, and at the urban edge, there exists an obvious weakening phenomenon of spatial justice and social equity.