BackgroundTravel surveys show that the amount of private car driving in Norway has increased significantly since the mid-1980s. Private car driving has for a long time been the main mode of transport for retail and service trips, and grocery shopping trips represent over 60% of the retail and service travels. Despite the growing number of studies addressing accessibility to daily destinations, to the best of the authors’ knowledge there are no studies examining these issues over time.MethodsThis paper aims to investigate changes in accessibility to grocery stores over time and use two counties in Norway as examples. Based on GIS data at a detailed level, distances from dwellings to nearest grocery store has been examined.FindingsThe results from the spatial analyses reveal significant changes from 1980 to 2019: The share of the population living within 500-m from a grocery store has decreased from 55% to 34% in one of the counties examined and from 36% to 19% in the other. This indicates that the share of people living within walking distance to a local grocery store has nearly halved. With such changes in accessibility to grocery stores, increased car driving for grocery shopping should not come as a surprise. Contrary to the frequent statements about sustainable urban development and active transportation, it seems that Norway still is developing as a country that in the future will be more and not less dependent on private cars.

In recent years, several systems and tools to assess energy consumption and carbon emissions at scales beyond that of merely buildings, such as LEED, CASBEE and BREEAM communities have been development. However, reviews reveal a lack of robustness in these methods both in terms of an unstructured mix of qualitative and quantitative criteria and lack of focus on urban form parameters found to influence energy consumption and carbon emissions. A promising quantitative assessment system including various urban form indicators is developed by the Urban Morphology Institute (UMI) in Paris. Within the research centre on zero emission neighbourhoods in smart cities (ZEN), a GIS-based method is applied to analyze conditions of urban form known to contribute to carbon emissions. In this paper we demonstrate how a selection of the UMI indicators describing proximity can be further specified applying GIS-based methods. The potential of applicability of urban assessment system in planning as well as design processes will increase when linked to tools that are already implemented, and map visualizations as well as data provided by these methods are highly applicable in planning and urban design. As further research, methods described in recent research within ZEN and specified measures for calculating UMI indicators, will be tested in analyses of urban development areas in Norway.

This project concerns the most centrally located and spatially complex area in central Stockholm. It is located directly to the west of the internationally well-known Stockholm City area developed in the 1950s and 1960s. Presently significant reconstruction of the central station and its track areas is under way which will also open up a large new development area in one of the most attractive locations in Stockholm. For this project Spacescape, an architectural office specializing in analysis of urban space and urban development projects in relation to urban life qualities such as, attractiveness, public safety and retail support formed an integrated consultancy group together with architects and landscape architects, delivering evaluation and design support to the project. This concerned both an analysis of the current status of the area, including the spatially complex interior of the central station, as well as support and evaluation of the different stages in the proposal. The themes analysed included spatial capital (accessibility to the rest of the city, especially for people working and living in the city), pedestrian flows, wayfinding, recreational qualities and public safety. Through continuous analyses during the design process Spacescape were able to support the project in a direction providing greater benefits in these areas and telling images show how the new proposal could create a much better outcome than the current one.