Accessible Cities: From Urban Density to Multidimensional Accessibility

Abstract

This chapter explores what makes a city accessible, both within an urban area such that residents are able to access what they require to attain wellbeing, as well as from outside in order that wider goals such as efficiency, wellbeing, innovation and enterprise or wider sustainability are achieved. This explicitly frames urban areas as integrated with the larger hinterlands of city regions and beyond, as discussed in Chapter One. The first section of this chapter highlights how density influences these different goals in numerous ways, although the exact relationships are often complex and contested. Finding flaws in a singular focus on density, the chapter then considers the need and usefulness of accessibility in urban planning and policy, and how its various dimensions can be measured. Finally the relationships between accessibility and urban form are also considered, and future research directions suggested. The second section provides a brief history of, and surveys current debates around, urban density, what it means and how it can be measured; the third section discusses what makes an ‘accessible city’, how that can be measured, and the various dimensions of accessibility; and the fourth section points to future research directions, incorporating state of the art reflections from cities across the world. Concerns with the health and social problems associated with ‘excessive’ urban density in particular contexts date from the Industrial Revolution in eighteenth to nineteenth century Europe, and provided an important stimulus to the rise of urban planning as a discipline in the late nineteenth century.

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