Accessibility Analysis
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.
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Sources
- Hansen, W. G. (1959). How accessibility shapes land use. Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 25(2), 73–76. DOI: 10.1080/01944365908978307 ↗
- Isard, W. (1960). Methods of Regional Analysis: An Introduction to Regional Science. MIT Press. ISBN: 9780262090032
How to cite this page
ScholarGate. (2026, June 22). Spatial Accessibility Analysis (Gravity-Based Accessibility). ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/en/human-geography/accessibility-analysis
Which method?
Set this method beside its closest kin and read them side by side — the library lays the books on the table; the choice is yours.
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