Resumen de Geospatial tools in the analyses of land use in the perspective of the accessibility of selected educational services in Poland

Marek Ogryzek, Konrad Podawca, Agnieszka Cienciała

• The observed urban growth leads to rapid changes in landscape and environment, increase of demands on sources, education and social services, etc. causing both positive results as well as considerable threats. In the era of modern technology development, including the commonness of GIS tools, obtaining geospatial data sets and their visualisation become easier. Their application allow for quick and advanced analyses of the current needs and prediction of the future ones. The present article discusses the problem of spatial accessibility of educational services in the city. This issue is very important from the perspective of the changes that took place along with the educational reform and the absence of urban planning regulations pertaining to the location of primary schools within a residential unit. Using 6 parameters and 3 indicators, as well as the example of the network of primary schools in the district of Bemowo, Warsaw the Authors of the paper showed the positive and negative features of spatial accessibility of those facilities and proposed methodology for analysis of spatial accessibility of educational services which was validated with Huff’s theory. The aim of the study was to obtain maps of the accessibility of educational institutions and to identify on their basis the areas that are educationally excluded. A Huff's relative gravity model was developed for the school sites, and the probability of the area of influence from each school was determined. Locations where the location of schools does not meet the demand of residents were identified. At the same time, they demonstrated the usefulness of GIS tools for geospatial analyses in terms of meeting the residents’ needs.