Accessibility and the education level

This report consists of two methodologies, a literature study and a case study, which need to point out the potential effects of the new planned metro line across Southern Rotterdam on the education level of this area. The more general literature study consists of three parts. After a theoretical introduction of the urban regeneration concept, the economic effects of investments in new infrastructure projects and in educational policies are investigated. It appears that investing in regeneration programmes like new infrastructure and investments in education, can be economically beneficial as long as a strategic perspective is kept in mind and integration of several approaches/policies will be applied. The literature review is used as background for the case study to the specific potential effects in Southern Rotterdam. The case study starts with a detailed description of the existing ideas. After that, a statistical analysis is applied to discover whether or not there is a relationship between the travel time and the number of students which are living in a particular district. It appears that the correlation coefficient is only -0,440 which means that 56 percent of the number of students living in a particular district cannot be explained by the travel time. In spite of this weak relationship, it appears that the influence of the travel time is still significant (0,015). Therefore a new metro line in Rotterdam will probably cause some changes in the number of students per district, but the potential effects of this single regeneration measurement to the education level in southern Rotterdam are just very limited and therefore it is uncertain that the desired spatial-economic changes for urban regeneration will occur.