Dominique Peeters

An Optimization-Based Study on the Redeployment of a Secondary School Network

In this paper we report the results of a study on secondary school planning made within the framework of Coimbras Educational Charter. Coimbra is a medium-sized municipality of 320 km2 and 150000 inhabitants located in the center-littoral region of Portugal. The planning problem addressed in the study consisted of defining the location, type, and size of the schools that should integrate Coimbras secondary school network in 2015, given, first, the excess of aggregate school capacity that currently characterizes the municipality, and, second, the change in school typology that needs to be implemented as a consequence of a recent reorganization of the Portuguese educational system. This problem was analyzed with a discrete facility-location model and considers decisions both of closing existing schools and of opening new schools. The model is a variant of the well-known p-median model, which aims at maximizing the accessibility of students to schools, with constraints on maximum and minimum capacity occupation that make model solutions lose the single assignment and closest assignment properties. As these are desirable properties in a public-facility planning context, they are enforced with explicit constraints. The results obtained through the model are discussed from the standpoint of the trade-off between school accessibility improvements and school network changes.

Urbanization in some hierarchical urban models

This paper examines two aspects of hierarchical urban models: the variations of total urban population and that of the urbanization ratio, in function of the number of hierarchical levels. Both variations are analysed through four categories of models. The complexity of the results suggests two approximations in order to make the analysis more tractable.

Disentangling the Demographic Determinants of the English Take-Off: 1530-1860

We propose a model with some of the main demographic, economic and institutional factors usually considered to matter in the transition to modern growth. We apply our theory to England over the period 1530-1860. We use the model to measure the impact of mortality, population density and technological progress on school foundations, literacy and growth through a set of experiments. We find that one third of the rise in literacy over the period 1530-1850 can be directly related to the rise in population density, while one sixth is linked to higher longevity and one half to exogenous total factor productivity growth. Moreover, the timing of the effect of population density in the model is consistent with the available evidence for England, where it is shown that schools were established at a high rate over the period 1540-1620.