Evaluating community accessibility for sustainable urban regeneration: A conceptual framework

Transport has a major impact on sustainability in urban areas. Urban planners and decision makers are facing an increasing challenge to develop interpretable measures to evaluate community accessibility in order to support sustainable urban regeneration. Accessibility is the ease with which an individual can access services and facilities that he or she needs or desires. Accessibility, as an indicator representing the complicated interactions between transport and land use systems, can be measured at a variety of spatial scales, ranging from nation, region, city down to neighbourhood levels, and can be used by different groups of people for varied purposes. Community accessibility at urban neighbourhood level is very much related to the residents' daily activities (e.g. school, shopping, and leisure) within a neighbourhood. To support sustainable urban regeneration, there is a need to define the concept of community accessibility and properly measure the indicators from the perspective of sustainability at community level.

This paper aims to propose a conceptual framework for evaluating community accessibility from a sustainable perspective. The following questions will be clarified and answered in this paper through extensive critical literature review: what components of transport and land use systems and what other spatial and temporal components (e.g. competition and time constraints) should be included into the definition of the concept? what data sets (e.g. spatial and temporal data) should be collected, processed and integrated? what data analysis should be developed and applied? how can the accessibility indicator be appropriately quantified? And how can the indicators be effectively interpreted and delivered to users? The proposed conceptual framework will provide guidelines for the future development in the area.