Compare methods

	Activity Space Analysis	Accessibility Analysis
Field	Human Geography	Human Geography
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1997	1959
Originator	Reginald Golledge & Robert Stimson	Walter G. Hansen
Type	Measure of the spatial extent of an individual's routine activities	Spatial index of the ease of reaching opportunities from a location
Seminal source	Golledge, R. G., & Stimson, R. J. (1997). Spatial Behavior: A Geographic Perspective. Guilford Press, New York. ISBN: 9781572300507	Hansen, W. G. (1959). How accessibility shapes land use. Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 25(2), 73–76.
Aliases	Activity Space Measurement, Individual Activity Space, Spatial Behaviour Analysis, Daily Activity Space	Hansen Accessibility, Gravity Accessibility Measure, Potential Accessibility, Spatial Accessibility Index
Related	4	4
Summary	Activity space analysis measures the geographic area within which an individual moves and carries out their routine daily activities — home, work, shopping, leisure — and the travel that links them. By delineating this lived spatial footprint from observed visit locations, it reveals how far and in what directions people actually range, and what environments they are exposed to in the course of ordinary life. It bridges the behavioural geography of Golledge and Stimson with modern mobility and health research that links where people go to the contexts they encounter.	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.