Compare methods

	Bid-Rent Analysis	Accessibility Analysis
Field	Human Geography	Human Geography
Family	Regression model	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1964	1959
Originator	William Alonso	Walter G. Hansen
Type	Theory of urban land rent and land-use allocation by distance to the centre	Spatial index of the ease of reaching opportunities from a location
Seminal source	Alonso, W. (1964). Location and Land Use: Toward a General Theory of Land Rent. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. ISBN: 9780674537019	Hansen, W. G. (1959). How accessibility shapes land use. Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 25(2), 73–76.
Aliases	Bid-Rent Theory, Alonso Bid-Rent Model, Urban Land-Rent Model, Bid-Rent Curve Analysis	Hansen Accessibility, Gravity Accessibility Measure, Potential Accessibility, Spatial Accessibility Index
Related	4	4
Summary	Bid-rent analysis is the urban-economics theory that explains how land rent and land use are organized by distance to the city centre. Developed by William Alonso in 1964, it represents each land use — commerce, industry, housing — by a bid-rent curve giving the maximum rent that use is willing to pay at each distance from the central business district. Because uses with steeper curves outbid others for central land, the observed rent is the upper envelope of all the curves, and the city sorts into concentric zones with the highest bidder winning each ring.	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.