| Summary: | Schools are public institutions, but they are also social infrastructure. They create social worlds that shape and preserve the surrounding communities. While schools and other public institutions, such as public libraries, have been found to be important structures of social infrastructure, the spatial conditions under which they assume that role has been understudied. This thesis investigates how the relationship between public schools and the surrounding neighborhood may vary depending on the spatial interdependence among their amenities. To identify spatial interdependencies, I conduct the analysis from two perspectives: the school and the neighborhood. I use georeferenced data and square footage of public schools’ amenities and recreational amenities in the neighborhood combined with community demographic information and student enrollment data at the building level for the City of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Using spatial accessibility foundations, I analyze what recreation amenities are accessible around schools beyond their own, and then I evaluate what is accessible around homes. I then determine how schools' amenities could contribute to recreational accessibility for residents and vice versa. Moreover, I construct measures of spatial dependency to evaluate the degree to which schools depend on neighborhood recreational amenities and vice versa. To examine social relationships beyond spatial interdependency, I conducted semi-structured interviews to understand non-spatial factors that enable or prevent school-community interaction. The results show that spatial interdependencies between schools and the neighborhood could satisfy the unmet demand via potentially shared amenities for recreational and community activities, and that spatial interaction occurs when a need for space emerges from one side or the other. The stronger the interdependency, the higher the likelihood of social interaction. The weaker the interdependency, the lower the probability of social interaction. And where there is no interdependency, a school-community relationship is less likely to be identified. The findings from the qualitative analysis affirmed the importance of bilateral relationships between the community and the schools. Beyond the spatial interdependency, I found physical, social, and administrative factors that enable or prevent school-community interaction. This research offers a methodological contribution that incorporates space into the study of school-neighborhood relationships.
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