Measuring Spatial Accessibility to Urban Facilities and Services in Tehran

Abstract

During the last quarter century the developing world has been experiencing rapid urban growth. These rapidly changing urban landscapes can create many new opportunities for economic growth but the same processes can also generate spatial inequalities within urban boundaries. Using recent and comprehensive geospatial data we describe, map and examine one dimension of urban spatial inequality, our results suggest that accessiblity to urban facilities and services. Our case study is Tehran; one of the most rapidly growing cities in the Middle East and he developing world. Geospatial data, Geographic Information Systems and spatial analytical tools were combined for mapping accessibility to thirty different urban facilities and services in Tehran. Descriptive maps identify areas of under and over services. Also we use the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index (HHI), commonly used in economics, to calculate the geographical distribution of urban facilities. Our results suggest that accessibility to urban facilities and services is widely varying within Tehran; with better accessibility found in some northern, central, and southern districts as well as in those districts lying along a north–south axis. Differences in HHI values reveal spatial inequality in geographical distribution of many facilities and services, particularly those of potential interest to demographers and health researchers (e.g., Red Crescent centers). The use of recent geospatial data to map and derive measures of accessibility can help both urban and public health planners to take the best courses of action to tackle the (spatial) inequality in access to urban facilities and infrastructure mainly public health facilities. Similarly, these data can be used to generate contextual variables for neighborhoods, districts and other subunits in the city that can be combined with health studies to examine the role of place characteristics in health disparities.