A Study in Urban Geography Qalqilia

The first inhabitants arrived in the present site of Qalgilia in 1913 AC . Qalgilia became a city in 1955 , then agovernorate at the Palestinian Authority era in 1996 . Referring to its geographical location , Qalgilia attracted the attention of the political governments . The study aimed at investigating the domicile characteristics , the functional structure of the city , the uses of land , the educational hygienic and commercial status of its district in , addition to the study of its plan during 1972-1997 . The analysis of 1997 statistics results showed that the young who are less than fifteen years old form 45.4% out of the whole population the young between 15-44 years old form 43% , the age group between 46-64 years old form 8.4 and those who are older than 65 years old form 3.2 % . The dependency percentage reached at 4.5 figure for each employed person , while it was 104.2 male against 100 female due to the gender variable which may differ from age category to another . The study revealed differences in the economical activities of the labor forces such as 24.2 % for the construction sector , followed by hand-made industry which forms 14.3 % , while the agricultural sector forms11.5 %) the workers in other handcrafts form 16.8 % . The services-Sector and the commercial sector reached to the same percentage which was 9.4 % . Workers in transportation sector form 4.5 % and 3.7 suffer from unemployment . The study showed that there is an expansion in the construction of high buildings rate , as it reached 46.3 % for the buildings which consist of two floors and 20.1% for the buildings with three floors The rate of the owned houses is 79.1%, while the rate of the rentable ones is 16 % out of the whole sample . The study also showed that the crowdedness average reached to 1.95 figure for a single room. There is a difference in crowdedness rat it is 2.5 person for each room in the old buildings and 1.6 --1.7 in the new ones . The study showed that there is a difference in land uses in Qalgilia and there is an overlapping in the employments especially in the commercial field which covers about 5% of the built up areas in the city and industrial field covers 20 % , while the residential field forms 85 % and 10% for the streets . Food staff stores form 22.5% , but stores without food 64.2 % and other places like cafes , cosmetic shops etc represent 13.3 out of the shops number in Qalqilia. The city suffers from the declining rate of the medical services . The study showed that every 1000 person share 0.4 bed of the city dwellers , it also. showed that every 1000 person share 0.8 in its geographical area . Qalqilia suffers from a shortage of nurseries and crowdedness in classrooms especially in primary stages 1-6, as there are 45.1 students inside each single rooms, on the other hand , there are 34.6 , students in every classroom in the secondary stage .