GIS-Based Public Services Analysis Based on Municipal Election Areas: A Methodological Approach for the City of Makkah, Saudi Arabia

Gomaa M. Dawod, Meraj N. Mirza, Ramze A. Elzahrany, Khalid A. Al-Ghamdi

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Deaprtment of Geography, Umm Al-Qura University, Makkah, Saudi Arabia.

DOI: 10.4236/jgis.2013.54036                

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.

Keywords

Public Services; Spatial Analysis; GIS; Saudi Arabia

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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