Multiscale accessibility and urban performance

Abstract

Accessibility is fundamentally thought to be related to functional, economic, and social performances of cities and geographical systems and, therefore, constitutes an essential aspect for spatial planning. Previous studies focused on cities or metropolitan scales, often disregarding their position within regional and national systems, which can greatly affect their performance. Although accessibility at various spatial scales has been examined, the studies focused on accessibility patterns at different scales, with no reference to the level of accessibility of cities over local, regional, and national scales simultaneously, i.e. multiscale accessibility. This study aims to elucidate the multiscale accessibility level of individual cities and examine its relationship to urban performance in the urban system of Israel. Spatial accessibility was analyzed using the space syntax methodology for the entire national road network across multiple geographic scales—from the local to the national scale. Based on three distinct spatial accessibility systems identified, a unique multiscale accessibility profile was created for individual cities in Israel. Subsequently, each city’s multiscale accessibility profiles were examined against urban performance indicators determined from urban scaling theory. We found that the superiority of cities characterized by high accessibility level plays a role not only for a specific scale but also over scales and spatial systems. Moreover, most urban performance indicators related to the multiscale accessibility profiles of cities, while some multiscale accessibility profiles can be related to over- or under-performance of cities. The findings suggest that pervasive accessibility across spatial scales is inherently connected to urban performance and may indicate on the implementation and interpretation of accessibility. These findings may assist in various aspects of spatial planning at various scales.

A Review of Spatial Mismatch Research: Empirical Debate, Theoretical Evolution and Connotation Expansion

“…In this regard, some studies have created functions that express job vacancies, labor market segmentation, employment competition, and the degree of spatial obstruction between two locations in order to measure spatial accessibility of jobs more accurately [71][72][73][74]. The scale is also a key issue to be considered in the accessibility measurement, since the level of accessibility of cities or metropolitan differs greatly with that of regional, local, and individual [75]. Accessibility of 15-min neighborhood level is often used responding to the current urban restructuring that much more employment activities are supposed to be done in the 15-min neighborhood instead of in city scale.…”

Multiscale Accessibility—A New Perspective of Space Structuration

“…The pervasive centrality refers to the function centrality that pervades the urban grid in a multiscale way in which centrality functions diffuse throughout a city's network at all spatial scales with a strong spatial correlation [176][177][178]. Recently, this perspective was validated on regional and national scales [167,179].…”

“…These can be demonstrated by a simple general example. Cities are not isolated as they are tightly interconnected [180] and are the main components of regional and national systems, while concomitantly, their position within these systems can significantly affect their performance [16,132,167,179]. Hence, the role and the position of cities within each system affect the city differently.…”

“…They begin by highlighting a patchy pattern of roads aggregating to settlements or cities and regions with more prominent central places from the rest of the settlement system [16,17,167]. Moreover, these spatial accessibility patterns may be linked to a general spatial division [17,167,179]. These methods inherently join the scale and size of a given geographical system, which is essential for a broader and more coherent perspective on spatial systems and the definition of scale [29].…”

Toward a Unifying Definition and Approach for Quantifying Urban Policy Performance

“…The ability to measure the impacts of planning policy has often been alluded to in multiple articles as “urban policy performance,” yet no clear consensus definition of this term fully exists (Boschken 2000; Kaplan et al, 2022). As community interests have been embraced as both formulators and targets of new policy, performance monitoring and evaluation have become both more complex and more necessary (Murtagh 1998).…”