TITLE:
GIS-Based Public Services Analysis Based on Municipal Election Areas: A Methodological Approach for the City of Makkah, Saudi Arabia
AUTHORS:
Gomaa M. Dawod, Meraj N. Mirza, Ramze A. Elzahrany, Khalid A. Al-Ghamdi
KEYWORDS:
Public Services; Spatial Analysis; GIS; Saudi Arabia
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Geographic Information System,
Vol.5 No.4,
July
30,
2013
ABSTRACT: The
spatial fairness of public services is a major aspect in offering a healthy and
cheerful living environment in a city. The Geographic Information System (GIS)
technology has been applied to investigate the spatial distribution of some
selected public services over the municipal election areas within Makkah city, Saudi Arabia.
These services include education, health, security, religious, commercial, and
sports services. The attained results show that except for religious services,
other public services are not quantitatively proportional with the population
variations in Makkah. It has been found that the third election area posses
almost one third of five public services and two thirds of the sport services.
That might be attributed to the fact that the third election area possesses almost a quarter of the city
population. But, although the first election area has a closer percentage of
the total population, it does not include a comparable percentage of public
services. On a spatial basis, results of GIS spatial analysis (particularly the
Euclidian distance, the mean distance band to a neighbor, the standard
distance, the directional distribution ellipse, and the average nearest
neighbor ratio tools) have concluded that there is inequity in the services
distribution over municipal election areas in Makkah city. Consequently, it is
recommended that local planners and decision makers should take the obtained
results into consideration to achieve fair and better distribution of public
services in the city.