Disadvantaged communities have lower access to urban infrastructure

Abstract

Disparity in spatial accessibility is strongly associated with growing inequalities among urban communities. Since improving levels of accessibility for certain communities can provide them with upward social mobility and address social exclusion and inequalities in cities, it is important to understand the nature and distribution of spatial accessibility among urban communities. To support decision-makers in achieving inclusion and fairness in policy interventions in cities, we present an open and data-driven framework to understand the spatial nature of accessibility to infrastructure among the different demographics. We find that accessibility to a wide range of infrastructure in any city (54 cities) converges to a Zipf’s law, suggesting that inequalities also appear proportional to growth processes in these cities. Then, assessing spatial inequalities among the socioeconomically clustered urban profiles for 10 of those cities, we find urban communities are distinctly segregated along social and spatial lines. We find low accessibility scores for populations who have a larger share of minorities, earn less and have a relatively lower number of individuals with a university degree. These findings suggest that the reproducible framework we propose may be instrumental in understanding processes leading to spatial inequalities and in supporting cities to devise targeted measures for addressing inequalities for certain underprivileged communities.

Conceptualizing Urban Inequalities as a Complex Socio‐Technical Phenomenon

“…Material and Energy flows , such as sewage systems and electric cables, also tend to be hidden from view and used intermittently. In contrast, Ecological Infrastructure , such as rivers and parks, and Urban Infrastructure , where systemic inequalities are prevalent in the distribution of amenities (Nicoletti, Sirenko, and Verma 2022) have direct, material interfaces with the social world.…”

Detecting the Spatial Association between Commercial Sites and Residences in Beijing on the Basis of the Colocation Quotient

“…However, different residential areas may have different levels of commercial accessibility, leading to differentiated commercial and residential spatial associations, because business owners' decisions about where to locate their establishments are influenced by the sociodemographic characteristics of residences [24]. Contrary to what the term "retail deserts" suggests, wealthy residential areas have better access to commercial facilities than residential areas with low household incomes and low levels of education, which exhibit few commercial facilities [4,6,9,12]. Few merchants enter high-poverty residential areas because of negative market conditions (i.e., low-income households are associated with low demand for goods and services) [9].…”

“…These changes have resulted in a mismatch between commercial sites and residences in terms of scale, function, format, and distribution [4][5][6][7]. As the spatial association between commercial sites and residences has a significant impact on people's daily lives and social fairness [8][9][10], investigating and assessing the spatial associations between commercial sites and residences is essential to streamlining commercial facilities' and residences' organization, increasing the efficiency of urban function allocation, and realizing scientific planning and management [11,12].…”

Calculating Indicators From Global Geospatial Data Sets for Benchmarking and Tracking Change in the Urban Environment

“…Other projects on various urban and nonurban topics have developed indicators using zonal statistics derived from global geospatial data sets (Bocher et al 2018;Jing et al 2019;Cochran et al 2020;Kuffer et al 2020;Sathyakumar et al 2020;Boeing et al 2022;Nicoletti et al 2022). However, this publication presents the first method of this kind developed by WRI to include multiple urban themes and focus on the needs of specific city cohorts and their questions around urban change, opportunities, and risks.…”