Influence of Higher Education Institutions in the urban environment. Proposed analysis from the spatial perspective

A key factor to understand the dynamics of development in cities is the identification of the role played by the various public and private actors in the configuration of its physical structure and sociocultural structures, and productive orientation. In this sense, educational institutions, particularly higher education institutions such as universities, can contribute to the development of cities in which they are located through the relationships they generate with their environment. These relationships are not always obvious and assessing their effects may require complex approaches to analysis. This paper proposes an approximation to evaluate the way in which the Mexican Higher Education Institutions (IES) contribute to configure the urban development conditions of its host cities, through a two-dimensional quantitative model based on a spatial-temporal analysis approach. The spatial dimension of the analysis was used to relate the presence of the university campus with characteristics of the urban structure in the economic aspect, the dynamics of land use and accessibility. The analysis incorporates variables of a physical and socioeconomic nature in the search for patterns that reveal tangible relations between the university and the city on an intra-urban scale, in some of the main Mexican cities, presenting results of the application of the model in the case of Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua.