Accessibility & land use

The importance of interaction opportunities

From the work of Alonso (1964) follows that economic opportunities play an important role in location decisions and that such economic opportunities vary across space; according to Alonso, by variation in costs of access to the economic centre. We can expand Alonso’s theory to take into account the complex spatial patterns of employment in modern polycentric urban landscapes, and state that access to job-markets is an important location factor for households. Let us expand Alonso’s theory even further and state that not just job-market access, but the opportunity to interact is central in location decisions of economically driven actors, and thus, in economically motivated land use changes. In this light an indication of the amount of interaction opportunities ought to be central in explaining and predicting land use change.

The SPINlab is involved in analysis of accessibility in multiple ways. Chris Jacobs-Chrisioni’s PhD. work currently is the main driving force op this topic. Specific attention is paid to historical analysis of accessibility by railway, and the relation between land use (change) and accessibility (research related to our Land Use Scanner model).

On this research topic we often work closely together with colleagues for the Department of Spatial Economics. An example of some nice Geovisualization-output is the following dynamic travel time analysis of driving times to Schiphol Amsterdam Airport on a regular working day:

Some of our publications related to Accessibility & land use

Env. & Planning A	Jacobs-Crisioni, C.G.W., Rietveld P., Koomen, E., Tranos, E., Evaluating the impact of land-use density and mix on spatiotemporal urban activity patterns: an exploratory study using mobile phone data, Environment and Planning A, 46 (11), pp.2769–2785, 2014.
SRM	Jacobs-Crisioni, C.G.W., De drijvende kracht van mobiliteit, Spinlab Research Memorandum SL-09, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, 2011.
SRM	Jacobs-Crisioni, C.G.W., Integration of present and future accessibility levels as spatially continuous utility factors in Land Use Scanner, Spinlab Research Memorandum SL-10, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, 2011.
E&P B	Borzachiello, M.T., Nijkamp, P., Koomen, E., Accessibility and urban development: a grid-based comparative statistical analysis of Dutch cities, Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 37 (1), pp.148-169, 2010.
IJESD	Borzachiello, M.T., Nijkamp, P., Scholten, H.J., A logistic regression model for explaining urban development on the basis of accessibility: a case study of Naples, Int. J. Environment and Sustainable Development, 8 (3/4), pp.300-313, 2009.