This study explores the physical features in the urban setting that give rise to inequitable outcomes for people with disabilities (PWDs), in particular, those with mobility impairments. The objective is to identify the dynamic elements of local active mobility networks that act as barriers to PWDs. A review of the principles and metrics of contemporary urban and transportation planning theory and practice is undertaken. This is contrasted against studies that define the heterogeneous needs and preferences of the disabled population. From this, a new framework is introduced - social topography. This model visualizes the community as a network of opportunities embedded into the physical and socio-economic fabric of the community. It is used as a tool for assessing active mobility networks of three neighbourhoods centered on transportation hubs in southern British Columbia, Canada. The audits reveal that accessibility is a complex and dynamic concept that should inform urban and transportation planning policy and practice. The nuances of absolute and relative access challenges are revealed when the social topography framework is applied. In order to reduce the inequitable outcomes that exist, urban and transportation planning will need to reconsider the underlying principles implicitly and explicitly employed as well as the measures and tools deployed. In the end, individuals and communities will benefit from this more inclusive urban planning paradigm.

This thesis studies peri-urban landscapes (the landscape between the rural and urban setting), which has until recently gained little attention in academia and even less in planning practice and policy. This is largely due to a general view of these landscapes as something transient that will be developed in the future. However, some research has recognised these landscapes as important for the leisure and recreation of urban and suburban dwellers. Thus, this thesis is concerned with the current state of the peri-urban landscape, its characteristics and drivers of change with a focus on accessibility. Accordingly, the interest of the study lies in exploring people’s landscape perceptions and uses in relation to the accessibility of periurban areas and how they change over time. The focus of this thesis is Ljubljana and Edinburgh; these two cities have been selected as the case studies in order to elucidate the spatial and social patterns of the space on the edge of the city. The thesis centres on the perspective of inner-city dwellers’ perceptions, use of, and accessibility to peri-urban green spaces. Guided by the sense of place theory and the landscape planning approach, empirical work is at the heart of this research. A mixed-method approach, comprising questionnaire and focus groups with inner-city dwellers, interviews with authorities and planners and GIS-based analysis, is applied to gain new knowledge of inner-city dwellers’ relationship with periurban green spaces. The research found that people greatly value the established peri-urban green spaces, which have a variety of meanings for them, varying according to people’s socio-demographic and cultural characteristics. Furthermore, the appreciation of extensive semi-natural green spaces and green corridors has been shown to be universal and may imply some clues for further spatial planning of these areas. Conversely, people in general did not use the areas with low intrinsic value that are perceived as messy, ambiguous, etc. It appears that these spaces have lost their sense of place and therefore they are under threat of further development. Their future should thus be considered within long-term planning goals, in order to ensure environmentally sustainable and socially inclusive development.

Despite the continued interest in transportation accessibility, it is still unclear how different types of accessibility measures relate to one another and which situations are best for each. The current study undertakes a statistical comparison among six transit accessibility measures (representing three main categories of accessibility models) to determine whether they are comparable and/or interchangeable. Specifically, this analysis considers a case study to measure individuals’ access to healthcare via paratransit. Results indicate that the three categories of accessibility measures provide drastically different interpretations of accessibility that cannot be duplicated by each other. Furthermore, the more closely accessibility models capture individuals’ perceptions and true access to activity opportunities, the more consistent and evenly distributed the results. / text

Public transport policies play a key role in shaping the social and spatial structure of cities. These policies influence how easily people can access opportunities, including health and educational services and job positions. The accessibility impacts of transport policies thus have important implications for social inequalities and for the promotion of just and inclusive cities. However, in the transportation literature, there is still little theoretically informed understanding of justice and what it means in the context of transport policies. Moreover, few studies have moved beyond descriptive analyses of accessibility inequalities to evaluate how much those inequalities result from transport policies themselves. This is particularly true in cities from the global South, where accessibility and equity have so far remained marginal concerns in the policy realm. This thesis builds on theories of distributive justice and examines how they can guide the evaluation of transport policies and plans. It points to pathways for rigorous assessment of the accessibility impacts of transport policies and it contributes to current discussions on transportation equity. A justice framework is developed to assess the distributional effects of transport policies. This framework is then applied to evaluate recent transport policies developed in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) in preparation to host sports mega-events, such as the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games, which included substantial expansion of the rail and Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) infrastructure. This research presents ex-post analyses of the policies implemented between 2014 and 2017 and ex-ante analysis of an as yet unfinished BRT project. It evaluates how the planned transport legacy of those mega-events impacted accessibility to sports venues, healthcare facilities, public schools and job opportunities for different income groups. The results show that there were overall accessibility benefits from the expansion in transport infrastructure between 2014 and 2017, but these were generally offset by the reduction in bus service levels that followed an economic crisis that hit the city after the Olympics. Quasi-counterfactual analysis suggests that, even if the city had not been hit by the economic crisis, recent transport investments related to mega-events would have led to higher accessibility gains for wealthier groups and increased inequalities in access to opportunities. Results suggest that those investments had, or would have had, greater impact on inequalities of access to jobs than in access to schools and healthcare facilities. The evaluation of the future accessibility impacts of the unfinished BRT corridor, nonetheless, indicates that such project could significantly improve access to job opportunities for a large share of Rio's population, particularly lower-income groups. Spatial analysis techniques show that the magnitude and statistical significance of these results depend on the spatial scale and travel time threshold selected for cumulative opportunity accessibility analysis. These results demonstrate that the ad-hoc methodological choices of accessibility analysis commonly used in the academic and policy literature can change the conclusions of equity assessments of transportation projects.