Towards incorporating location choice into integrated land use and transport planning and policy: A multi-scale analysis of residential and job location choice behaviour

Abstract

Residential and job location decisions have lasting impacts on the emergent structure of cities, which in turn, determines travel patterns, energy use and travel-related greenhouse gas emissions. The ability to understand and predict these choice processes are therefore crucial to long-term sustainable urban land use and transport strategies. Understanding housing-job location choice processes requires unpacking the interplay among heterogeneous attributes of decision-makers on the one hand, and various location-defining attributes observable at multiple spatial scales on the other hand. Also, to better understand the interdependence between these location choice sets, empirical examination of how the home and work locations respond to each other over time is necessary. This study responds to these empirical imperatives by exploring residential-job location choice behaviour of households and individuals in a metropolitan context in Ghana, West Africa. The study utilizes data from a cross-sectional survey of 665 households and their 1158 individual workers in the Kumasi metropolis, Ghana’s second largest metropolis. Results show variations in preferences among households and individuals for macro-scale location-defining factors as well as discrete spatial choice alternatives specified as urban-zones, dwelling types and tenancy arrangements. Retrospective analysis of the residential-job choice interdependence shows that in most cases, residential location decisions are taken first, implying a sequential choice process where job location decisions are subsequently anchored on the initial home locations. Besides the in-depth empirical contributions, the paper outlines how the findings could ultimately inform the development of planning support systems to integrate location choice into sustainable urban development and transport management policies.