Abstract Summary
Studies of accessibility have advanced our understanding of social and spatial inequalities in the distribution of jobs and other resources in cities worldwide. In response, prominent discourse has shifted to embedding justice in urban planning. In this work, we take a step towards developing specific indicators that quantify spatial justice based on ethical principles of Egalitarianism, Utilitarianism and Rawls’ Egalitarianism. Subsequently, we show how these can be leveraged to steer accessibility planning toward socially just outcomes. We utilise these indicators to evaluate neighbourhood reach opportunities to places of employment through cumulative accessibility metrics. These metrics are based on applying the Dijkstra algorithm to integrated urban network models of transportation, land use and street configuration, created from open-access data in the Netherlands, Mexico and South Africa. We find that shorter commuting times reveal local centres, highlighting the role of local mixed land use. Whereas increased access to global centres and mass transportation play more of a role in longer commuting times. The results highlight how spatial justice to places of employment is both scale and value-reliant, depending on the applied commuting time and ethical principle. The methodological innovation presented here is based on principles of reproducibility and allows the opportunity to bring moral clarity to strategic planning decisions across urban contexts that could serve as a valuable baseline to develop policy.
