Measuring objective accessibility to neighborhood facilities in the city (A case study: Zone 6 in Tehran, Iran)
Introduction
The desire to improve the quality of life (QOL) in a particular place or for a particular group is an important focus of attention for planners. We could go further, and suggest that the enterprise of planning as a public activity is strongly motivated and justified in terms of its potential contributions to citizens’ QOL (Massam, 2002, p. 142). The latter consists of two dimensions, the objective and the subjective. The latter dimension relates to the tendencies and characters of citizens, while the objective is dependent upon the physical environment of their living place. The characteristics of objective quality of life are important issue for study.
Urban public spaces are the important locations which influence the quality of life and the welfare of people, both directly and indirectly. Implicit in the public provision of amenities such as parks, recreational facilities and social and cultural services, is a belief that they are beneficial to residents’ well-being (Witten et al., 2003).
Accessibility is in turn an important factor which impacts all aspects of public space in both direct and indirect ways. Accessibility can be defined in different ways, and once more objective and subjective dimensions are important. Objective accessibility is a key factor and physical distance is still important in developing countries.
The use of public facilities can be linked to accessibility, and thus residential proximity to facilities and services can be theorized as contributing to health and wellbeing in a number of ways. In addition to easier and more direct access to places to shop, exercise, work, meet neighbors, have a health check, etc., it confers opportunities by reducing the time and financial costs of access, which in turn frees individual and household resources for use elsewhere (Pearce et al., 2006, p. 389). There have been many studies in the field of public spaces; these cover different scales, from neighborhood units (Larsen and Gilliland, 2008) to the national level (Pearce et al., 2008) and include a broad range of public spaces including access to healthy food provision (Cummins and Macintyre, 2002, Apparicio et al., 2007), access to green space (Hillsdon et al., 2006, Coutts, 2008), access to health services (Luo and Wang, 2003, Tanser et al., 2006), access to recreational services (Diez Roux et al., 2007, Robitaille and Herjean, 2008), and access to open spaces (Witten et al., 2008).
Generally speaking, these researchers have addressed different methods of analyzing the accessibility to public spaces (Fortney et al., 2000, Fone et al., 2006, Yang et al., 2006) or by presenting a new method for measuring accessibility with respect to the previous methods attempted to examine the socio-economic characters of place and then compared their findings with the level of accessibility to public spaces (Witten et al., 2003, Apparicio et al., 2007, Pearce et al., 2008).
This research has, however, had some limitations in the field of measuring objective accessibility to public spaces. The most common of these limitations has been the arbitrary nature in which neighborhoods have been “conceptualized and operationalized” (Macintyre et al., 2002).
In many instances, neighborhood has been predefined as the administrative unit (often census area) for which data are easily available (Cummins et al., 2005). Also, these studies have confined themselves to certain scales (such as a neighborhood unit or a city) due to shortages of statistical data at different scales; this has limited the option of integrating accessibility measurement. Such limitations, however, have been mitigated by applying geographic information analysis (GIS) in some degree and this has provided a good ground for integration of accessibility level information at different scales.
Whilst measuring accessibility to public facilities has received considerable attention on the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, there are few studies outside of the Anglophone world, especially in developing countries such as Iran. Megalopolises in the developing world are experiencing an unprecedented growth, and even the ever increasing budgets of the national and local governments cannot cope with the huge and diverse problems of these cities. Statistics show that the growth of Iran’s capital has slackened in recent years but now the redistribution of urban resources needs attention. The present research is one of the first studies to pursue the following goals.
- 1
Constructing a new methodology for measuring the level of objective accessibility to public spaces by using GIS.
- 2
Investigating the distribution of the public spaces with respect to the socio-economic characteristics of the citizens in a hitherto unexplored setting such as Tehran.
The study presents a precise and straightforward methodology and aims to be simple for application by urban authorities who need to measure objective accessibility to public spaces. There is an argument between traffic engineers and urban planners, as the former generally use complicated models associated with many indicators to measure accessibility. These models often are very complicated which make interpretation and explanation very difficult even for many of the experts. In contrast, urban planners use models which are simpler and perceivable, although the necessity of applying complicated models is quite usual. Since the implementation and feasibility of such models is strongly dependent upon the cooperation of many bodies like urban experts, authorities and residents, the clarity and simplicity could help every one to participate.
The second goal, with higher importance, would be developed by proposing two subsequent questions.
- •
Are there spatial inequalities in objective access to public spaces (such as local parks, stores and elementary schools) in selected settings?
- •
Are there socio-economic inequalities in objective access to public spaces (such as: local parks, stores and elementary schools) in selected settings?
Finding the responses could help and guide urban authorities in the distribution and allocation of the different resources and opportunities in the city.
Section snippets
Measuring accessibility
Accessibility is a frequently-used concept but there is no consensus about its definition. It is a common term experienced by diverse individuals (i.e. characterized by different needs, abilities and opportunities) at any place and moment of the day, which results in considerable variation in components included in its measurement, and in how it is formulated (Vandenbulcke et al., 2008, p. 2). Accessibility refers to the ease with which a building, place or facility can be reached by people
Case study and methods
Zones 6 and 12 comprise the Central Business District (CBD) of Tehran City, shown in Fig. 1 along with the 22 Zones of Tehran. With an average density of about 146 people per hectare in the built-up area, it is a dense city by world standards (Bertaud, 2003, p. 3). Its average administrative density is calculated to be about 110 people per hectare, which is close to the average administrative density of Zone 6 (about 103 persons per hectares). With an area of 2149 hectares, the latter is about
Results and discussion
The methodology allows us to address the first question: are there spatial inequalities in objective access to public spaces (such as: local parks, stores and elementary schools) in the selected setting? The primary information was obtained by applying the methodology:
The results show generally that most of the residents had a high accessibility (lesser than 800 m) to the public spaces, as the figures reveal more than 85% accessed highly and only less than 7% had low accessibility to such
Conclusion
This study explored issues of measuring objective accessibility to neighborhood facilities with respect to the socio-economic status in Zone 6 in Tehran City. This study is the first known attempt to present an analysis of the spatial patterning of local public spaces access (such as parks, stores and schools) in a hitherto unexplored setting such as a developing country. It first tried to create a new methodology for measuring the level of objective accessibility to public spaces and second it
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Professor Kirby and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable and insightful comments and suggestions.
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