Assessment of spatial distribution of schools in the northern area of Riyadh city

This paper aims to study the distribution of three types of schools in the northern area of Riyadh city in Saudi Arabia in order to uncover the aspects of imbalance distribution of schools over the 4 districts of the study area (Almalqa, Sahafa, Jasmine and Narges neighborhoods) in addition to assess the extent of compatibility between the number of schools in each district and the density of population residing in it. The used dataset is built up of mainly tow datasets for schools and districts covering the study area. This research has utilized MS Excel, ArcGIS and QGIS software and applied the Point-to-Polygon overlay to locate the three types of schools in their corresponding districts and three types of analysis were applied which are the average nearest neighbor, heat map, and district classification based on population ratio with the aim of exploring the clustering patterns of schools as well as classifying the districts based on the density of schools relative to population. The study concludes that there is a spatial disparity in the distribution of schools, mainly in terms of their density, in the different districts due to the variation in population. Moreover, a notable inequality of the distribution of schools with respect to the population has been found.