Today, major planning agendas in Europe steer the future of territorial organization towards an urban polycentric perspective. The accessibility to services of general interest (SGI), a significant source of spatial inequality in Europe, is one of the key challenges to address. However, instruments needed to support the implementation and monitoring of territorial policy measures regarding the distribution of, and accessibility to SGI are still underdeveloped. Studies generally relate to the (intra)regional and not the national scale. When they do so, they lose local specificity as they often consider the existence/availability of services at a given scale and not the actual capacity to reach their (often just estimated) location through the transport network. In the context of the revision of Portugal's National Plan for Territorial Planning Policies, this paper presents a comprehensive multi-criteria location-based approach for measuring the factual accessibility to a representative range of SGI at the national Portuguese scale. Results are evaluated considering the dichotomy between centrality and periphery, high and low density, and the regional disparities found. High accessibility values do not necessarily mean greater territorial cohesion. Contributions to the development of national planning policies that respond to cohesion challenges are also debated.

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Today, commerce is regarded as city-shaping activity that has intrinsic connections with the way urban spaces are composed and function, and the choices people make on where to live and how to travel. Hence the literature is concerned about the territorial reflection of commercial hierarchies, particularly as the sector is increasingly changing due to new types of products, stores and purchase and payment options. In this paper we built on previous research associating retail with geo-morphological patterns, by analysing the hierarchies within the city of Porto, in Portugal, and focusing on neighbourhood clusters where all the five categories of retail considered are present (Daily; Occasional; Exceptional (Comparison); Occasional (Comparison); Isolated purchase). By introducing variables related to geographical proximity, morphology (relation to street segments) and the establishments themselves (activity type, opening date) we dig deeper into the organizational aspects of the commercial network, so that in future works causality effects can be understood, leading to a better managment of urban retail in a perspective of cohesion and equitable access.

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