Geospatial Analytics to Support District Efficiency, Fairness and Equity

Districting is essential in establishing efficient, fair, and equitable boundaries across various domains such as trade and service provision, land-use development, school attendance, and political representation. This paper introduces a robust spatial optimization model tailored to delineate a districting strategy that accounts for issues of equinumerosity, compactness, and contiguity, among others. The model is designed to ensure an even distribution of population across districts while ensuring compact and contiguous boundaries. By integrating advanced GIScience and spatial optimization techniques, the model aims to maximize compactness metrics and balance population, producing districts that are both geometrically efficient and demographically representative. Explicit contiguity constraints are imposed to guarantee geographical connectedness among districts. To assess the efficacy of the proposed methodology, application to a school district in California is considered. Our findings highlight GIScience capabilities to identify district boundaries that outperform traditional districting schemes in addressing population balance and compactness.