Compare methods

	Accessibility Analysis	Central Place Analysis
Field	Human Geography	Human Geography
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1959	1933
Originator	Walter G. Hansen	Walter Christaller
Type	Spatial index of the ease of reaching opportunities from a location	Theory and analytic framework for the size, number, and spacing of settlements
Seminal source	Hansen, W. G. (1959). How accessibility shapes land use. Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 25(2), 73–76.	Christaller, W. (1966). Central Places in Southern Germany (C. W. Baskin, Trans.). Prentice-Hall. (Original work published 1933). ISBN: 9780131226302
Aliases	Hansen Accessibility, Gravity Accessibility Measure, Potential Accessibility, Spatial Accessibility Index	Central Place Theory, Christaller Central Place Model, Settlement Hierarchy Analysis, Central Place Hierarchy
Related	4	4
Summary	Accessibility analysis measures how easily opportunities — jobs, shops, clinics, parks — can be reached from a given location, combining the attractiveness (size) of destinations with the cost of travelling to them. The gravity-based formulation introduced by Walter Hansen in 1959 sums the opportunities at all destinations, each discounted by a distance-decay function of travel cost, producing a single accessibility score per origin that has become a foundational concept in transport geography and urban planning.	Central place analysis is the study of the size, number, and spacing of settlements as service centres, grounded in Walter Christaller's central place theory of 1933. It explains why settlements form an orderly hierarchy — many small villages, fewer towns, a handful of cities — and why higher-order centres are spaced farther apart and offer more specialized goods, deriving the famous nested pattern of hexagonal market areas from two economic concepts: the range and the threshold of a good.