Territorial planning and implementation of full-time education in municipal schools from Rio de Janeiro using GIS
ISBN 978-85-88783-11-9
Authors
1Souza, L.
1INSTITUTO PEREIRA PASSOS (CITY OF RIO DE JANEIRO) Email: leandrogs86@gmail.com
Abstract
The Strategic Plan for the City of Rio de Janeiro estimates that 35% of the enrollment in municipal public schools must be in full-time education by 2016. This educational policy implicates in the definition of the best location in the territory to build new schools and to reform the existing units, expanding the number of classrooms. Aiming towards this goal, the Municipal Department for Education (SME) and the Pereira Passos Institute (IPP), from the municipality of Rio de Janeiro, started to work together to define where and how many schools needed to be built and reformed to successfully reach this objective. The city was divided in areas, comprising a group of schools. For each area, it would be offered all educational segments in full-time education. In this way, a more efficient solution could be made, offering education near to the students and minimizing the impacts of displacements through the city. The division of the city in areas was defined considering the mobility and the population on territory. First of all, considering the best displacement of the students to reach the nearest school, IPP checked the existence of main roads, railway, large rivers and hills, adjusting the division of the education areas to this situation. To determinate the total demand, a GIS tool was developed to population estimate, based in the ArcGIS Spatial Analyst extension. Using the 2010 Census data, the information of number of children was generated, for each age group corresponding to the educational segments separately, so it was possible to estimate the specific need in each area. To the Census data, IPP added also the expectation of population increase by licensed housing program, based on the number of residential unities and the approximate number of children for each unity. A large amount of data regarding the existing municipal schools – current educational segments offered, total enrollments in partial and full-time, number of existing classrooms, total area and non-built area, and other infrastructure of the units – was used to determine how many schools/classrooms had to be built in order to meet the calculated demand, using the georeferenced database of schools and the polygons of the education areas. For the identification of terrains for the construction of new schools, IPP used high-resolution orthophotos and with image classification identified non-edified land. This information was overlaid with the georeferenced database of municipal estate, so it was possible to differentiate between particular and public terrains. A layer of unsuitable areas for occupation was created, based in information of inadequate land uses (flood areas, forests, water bodies), slopes and natural reserves. IPP has created a web application based in ArcGIS Server, integrating the geographical database of identified terrains with data from several sources, including information gathered in field survey by inspection teams, like photos and other documents. Several municipal departments participated in this stage – Mayor’s Office, Municipal Urbanization Company, Real Estate, Housing and Urban departments of Rio de Janeiro City Hall. This web application was essential to update the database and facilitate the information sharing among municipal departments responsible for locating and building schools. With this work, it was possible to successfully design the policy of full-time education based on its intrinsic territorial dimension, considering the location of schools and students. A great amount of geographical and alphanumeric school data was produced, georeferenced and analyzed, with massive organization of information from several departments in a workflow that assured information sharing, which demonstrates that integration and sharing of geographical information is essential for efficient public policies and municipal management.
Keywords
education; territorial planning; Rio de Janeiro