Editorial

Cities special section on Analysis and Planning of Urban Settlements: The Role of
Accessibility
Accessibility has been the focus of many studies in recent dec-
ades. The widespread adoption of the accessibility concept demon-
strates the originality of Hansens (1959) and Weibulls (1976)
vision. They were the rst to dene accessibility systematically.
In essence, these two authors interpreted and modeled accessibil-
ity as the potential opportunities which can be reached from a
given place by paying a certain generalized and space/time
based cost.
It is worth saying that the vast number of authors that have so
far adopted and still adopt potential accessibility is the best proof
of the efcacy and elegance of this approach. Many review studies
emphasize the relevance of this denition of accessibility from
both the theoretical and empirical viewpoint (see inter alia Barad-
aran & Ramjerdi, 2001; De Montis & Reggiani, in press; Geurs, Kri-
zek, & Reggiani, 2012; Geurs & Wee, 2004; Handy & Niemeier,
1997; Jones, 1981; Reggiani & Martn, 2011; and Wu & Hine, 2003).
Thus accessibility appears to be a useful tool for best practice
and planning (Geurs et al., 2012). In this context, a line of research
is clearly devoted to the accessibility of urban systems. There is
interesting specialization in the scientic literature on accessibility
in an urban setting. Lau and Chiu (2004) study the inuences of
land-use policy and public transport system development on their
accessibility to workers. Many investigations relate accessibility to
the following urban public goods: public spaces (Lot & Koohsari,
2009; Pasaogullari & Doratli, 2004), opportunities of access to
space and time for one or multiple persons (Neutens, Versichele,
& Schwanen, 2010), metro systems (Prasertsubpakij & Nitivattan-
anon, in press), labor markets (Reggiani, Bucci, Russo, Haas, &
Nijkamp, 2011), streets (Travenolo & Costa, 2008), services
(Vasconcelos & Farias, 2012), and green spaces (Wright Wendel,
Zarger, & Mihelcic, 2012).
Starting from the above considerations, reections on the role of
accessibility in the analysis and planning of urban settlements cer-
tainly remain valid arguments that are worth exploring. This is the
rationale which characterizes the articles included in this Special
Section. To be more precise, Caschili and De Montis (2013) analyze
accessibility in the US commuter system; Monzn, Ortega, and
Lpez (2013) analyse accessibility in terms of the impact of the
Spanish high speed rail system on urban areas; Ratner and Goetz
(2013) study the accessibility of transit-oriented development, as
well as its impact on urban morphology and land use; Bentlage,
Lthi, and Thierstein (2013) consider the accessibility of German
agglomerations with respect to physical and non-physical connec-
tivity; and, nally, Tranos, Reggiani, and Nijkamp (2013) construct
an index of digital accessibility to European cities. These contribu-
tions have been originally selected from among the papers
presented in a ERSA-NECTAR
1
Special Session on Accessibility and
Spatial Patterns organized by Andrea De Montis and Aura Reggiani
under the aegis of the ERSA 50th Conference held in Jnkping
(Sweden) on 1923 August, 2010.
Table 1 can be used to link the ve articles collected in this Spe-
cial Section. In detail, in Table 1, the papers collected in this Special
Section are classied according to the following main features:
1. Transportation system indicates to which transportation context
the authors are referring.
2. Country elucidates the national context under analysis.
3. Socio-economic variable refers to the categories of people that
are analyzed in their mobility/accessibility choices.
4. Spatial context explains the level of spatial organization of the
data.
5. Time period reports the time span when the data were collected.
6. Methodology indicates the analytical tool(s) adopted for con-
structing the accessibility measures.
7. Accessibility measurements/proxy reports on the measurements
used to calculate the level of accessibility.
Interestingly, when the methodological approaches adopted by
the authors are considered, one thing which becomes clear is the
novelty of these approaches. Cities can, indeed, be considered as
complex systems, as they are characterized by many elements act-
ing in an uncertain and unpredictable environment. Accessibility is
often adopted as a framework for tackling complexity in an at-
tempt to achieve elegance and simplicity (for a review, see Reggi-
ani, 2012). In this respect, the essays above invoke approaches
which are able to untangle the many issues involved in the most
efcient way possible. We envisage in this Special Section the
following three leitmotifs, listed according to their relevance: dig-
ital accessibility; complexity and network analysis; and advanced
spatial analysis (based on GIS).
With respect to the rst approach, the contributions can be
grouped into two clusters, based on their special focus on physical
accessibility (Caschili & De Montis, 2013; Monzn et al., 2013;
Ratner & Goetz, 2013) and on non-physical accessibility (Bentlage
et al., 2013; Tranos et al., 2013). This subdivision indicates the
close relationship between physical and virtual (urban) transport
networks. Life in contemporary cities is characterized by the
development of a variety of interlaced activities, undertaken by
0264-2751/$ - see front matter 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2012.08.001
1
ERSA (European Regional Science Association): http://www.ersa.org/; NECTAR
(Network on European Communications and Transport Activity Research): http://
www.nectar-eu.org.
Cities 30 (2013) 13
Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect
Cities
j our nal homepage: www. el sevi er . com/ l ocat e/ ci t i es
individuals in very short periods of time, thanks to efcient urban
transport and communication systems. In this respect, it is possible
to recognize the connections between a hard urban infrastructure
constituted by the neighborhoods, buildings, streets, stores, parks
and a soft urban infrastructure consisting of internet devices, rou-
ters, optical ber wires, and the websites and web pages of institu-
tions and rms. The literature on these themes is relevant (see,
inter alia, Janelle & Hodge, 1998). In addition, the information
and communication technology revolution has led to the birth of
the cyber-city and to its tremendous development over many hy-
per-layers. The dynamic interplay between the hard and soft city
is the subject of many research studies (see also Bentlage et al.,
2013 as well as Tranos et al., 2013). It should be noted that after
so many applications of conventional physical accessibility, recent
studies analyze the possibility of reaching cities, by introducing a
new concept, digital (i.e. non-physical) accessibility. Even though
this analysis is fascinating, the practical application of digital
accessibility requires a great amount of data from a variety of
sources and that these obviously differ from the traditional data
sets/sources used in accessibility studies of the hard city. Never-
theless, given the fast evolution and related massive diffusion
of information technologies, studies on the construction of digital
accessibility will certainly constitute the cutting edge of future re-
search on accessibility, by providing new insights into the related
elds of analysis, particularly in the study of the connectivity of ur-
ban networks.
The second leitmotiv of this Special Section is the complexity
approach, which aims to investigate complex urban areas. The
complexity approach is based on the network metaphor, according
to which any system can be disentangled by dening a set of nodes
standing for places, agents, rms, etc. and a set of edges
describing relationships, ows, commuters, etc. Complex Network
Analysis (CNA) has its roots in graph theory, a systematic approach
which dates back for centuries and was re-adopted by Erds and
Rnyi (1960) to dene and describe classes of random graphs.
The use of CNA increased massively at the end of the last millen-
nium, when many scholars began to construct algorithms for data
mining which were able to systematize a relevant quantity of data,
in order to characterize very large networks, and classify systems
into various classes: inter alia, small-world (see the seminal work
by Watts & Strogatz, 1998) and scale free networks (Barabsi & Al-
bert, 1999). These works opened up a new eld of investigation,
the topological analysis of many systems in natural and socio-
economic science. In particular, in recent decades, CNA has been
applied to a variety of networks that evolve in geographical space
(for an extensive review, see Barthlemy, 2010). In this respect
CNA is cross-fertilizing other elds, such as geography, regional
science, spatial economics, transport economics and planning, spa-
tial analysis and planning. In this context potential accessibility is a
simple but powerful indicator related to fundamental models
in spatial economics, such as spatial interaction models and logit
models, and thus capable of decoding the complexity of the urban
network under analysis (Reggiani, 2012). Network analysis pro-
vides the connectivity framework of the accessibility indicator, be-
cause it considers the relational, topological, properties of each
node and the key bridging features of the associated edges. As a re-
sult, different network structures can give rise to different accessi-
bility patterns (Reggiani et al., 2011). The dynamic role of
accessibility in urban networks, connected to the resilience and
vulnerability issues, has also been outlined recently (Reggiani,
2012; Taylor & Susilawati, 2012).
Network analysis, seen in terms of accessibility, interlaces al-
most all the papers of this Special Section. This approach ts very
well with the conceptualization and measurement of conventional
accessibility (Caschili & De Montis, 2013; Monzn et al., 2013), as
well as with digital accessibility (Bentlage et al., 2013; Tranos
et al., 2013), since a parallel can be made between physical cit-
ies/rms and non-physical cyber city/rms. The methodological
interplay between the network metaphor and digital accessibility
certainly represents a very promising eld of research, especially
in light of the evolution of urban systems and the related accessi-
bility congurations.
The third approach which is part of the framework of the pres-
ent Special Section is advanced spatial analysis based on geo-
graphic information systems (GISs). The literature on GIS is
already overwhelmingly large. It has caused a revolution rstly
in geography and cartography and, secondly, in sciences interested
in the analysis of those systems, whose elements contain explicit
references to their position on the earths surface (see inter alia
Goodchild, 2009). Spatial economists and planners and, in general,
regional scientists have benetted from the adoption of GIS and re-
lated tools. The scholars interested in network analysis in particu-
lar have always welcomed the development of ad hoc extensions in
licensed (see for instance the ArcGIS Network Analyst

, 2012) and
open release (see ComplexNetGIS, 2012, quoted by Caschili & De
Montis, 2013) tools. These instruments provide the analysts with
powerful lenses while also dealing with accessibility measurement
(see Accesstool introduced by Monzn et al., 2013; Neutens et al.,
Table 1
Synopsis of the main features of the papers in this special section.
Authors Transportation
system
Country Socio-
economic
variables
Spatial context Time period Methodology Accessibility measure/
proxy
Caschili, De Montis Commuting transport
network
USA Commuters Census county 2000 Spatial interaction models
and network analysis
Potential of
opportunities
Monzn, Ortega,
Lpez
High speed rail and
road network
Spain Resident
population
City 20052020 Network analysis in a GIS
environment (Accesstool)
Population in cities
accessed in a given
generalized travel time
Ratner, Goetz Metropolitan railway USA Resident
population
City of Denver 20002010 Descriptive analysis of
survey data
Quality of residential and
commercial urban
development
Bentlage, Lthi,
Thierstein
Railway, road, and
airplane networks
(physical
accessibility)/rms
websites (non
physical accessibility)
Germany Firms NUTS 3 regions
and Functional
Urban Area
(FUA)
2006, 2008 Potential of opportunities
(physical accessibility)/
service activity matrix,
interlocking network
model (non-physical
accessibility)
Potential of
opportunities (physical
accessibility)
connectedness within
the rms network (non-
physical accessibility)
Tranos, Reggiani,
Nijkamp
Internet Europe City NUTS3 regions 2005, 2008 Spatial interaction models
and network analysis
Digital accessibility:
potential for virtual
interaction
2 Editorial / Cities 30 (2013) 13
2010; Yigitcanlar, Sipe, Evans, & Pitot, 2007). The last two papers in
this Special Section (Bentlage et al., 2013; Tranos et al., 2013),
which deal with digital accessibility by using spatial interaction
models combined with network analysis, also acknowledge the
role of GIS as a support tool for visualizing and analyzing different
scenarios. In conclusion, the adoption of GIS tools is becoming
essential in the current investigations of spatial economic net-
works. The visualization of spatial data sets in support of accessi-
bility studies appears to be a necessary instrument for a better
understanding of the evolution of accessibility and related patterns
in urban networks, in the context of new policy interventions at
both physical and non-physical level.
The editors wish to thank all the authors and referees for their
valuable cooperation, and also for providing novel methodological
reections on the important issue of accessibility and its impact on
the analysis and planning of urban areas and networks.
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Andrea De Montis
Dipartimento di Agraria, University of Sassari, Italy
Tel.: +39 079 229242; fax: +39 079 229340.
E-mail address: andreadm@uniss.it
Aura Reggiani
Department of Economics, University of Bologna, Italy
E-mail address: aura.reggiani@unibo.it
Available online 22 August 2012
Editorial / Cities 30 (2013) 13 3