Gated university campus and its implications for socio-spatial inequality: Evidence from students' accessibility to local public transport

Rapid urbanization has led to a massive transformation of urban space in China, spatially and socially. Its higher education has been growing much faster than ever before, along with an explosive increase of university students’ population. Different from the Western universities, a majority of Chinese university students are required to reside in gated campuses. Their accessibilities to public transport and subsequent spatial and social implications have been neglected in the literature. Taking Wuhan city as a case study, this paper aims to examine the public transport service to gated university campuses and its impacts on spatial and social inequalities. The spatial accessibility is measured by four methods: proximity-based, gravity-based, population-weighted average, and competition-based, using population data at residential building level. All the results have confirmed the presence of spatial and social inequalities in public transport accessibility for university campuses and students population. The study has also found that these inequalities are not contributed directly from the provision of public transport services but the closure of gated campus to the external public transport.