Spatial aspects of census districting

Abstract

Urban districting refers to partitioning of an urban area into smaller regions for a specific application in order to effectively facilitate and enhance the quality of municipal services. Among other considerations, which are imposed by the general problem or the application in hand, several factors in urban districting have spatial aspects, many of which have been disregarded in most of districting plans, and only descriptive measures have been considered. This paper explores the impact of spatial aspects on census districting, as an important urban districting. It proposes an approach that not only considers the workload, as the most effective criterion in census districting, but spatial criteria such as compactness, barriers and travers length are also involved. The implementation results of the proposed approach for a case study have been evaluated and discussed.