Accessibility and socioeconomic activities location

This paper aims at analyzing to what extent changing accessibility affects the distribution of residential and economic activities in a region. The study is carried out by mean of empirical and modeling analyses. The case study is that of the Regione Campania, one of the 20 administrative regions of Italy. The empirical study consists of before-and-after analyses correlating the variation of zone accessibility to the variation of population and other economic activities (Commerce, services, etc) over a 20 years long period. The results of the analyses carried on show that the impact of accessibility on the location of certain economic sectors is negligible (e.g. for Public services, Wholesale), while it is significant for Residents, Retail, Private Services location. In the latter case, however, it is evident that there are other factors affecting such location choice even stronger than accessibility (e.g. housing prices, congestion of the urban system, and so on). In order to deeper investigate such issues, an integrated modelling framework simulating land-use and transport interaction is proposed. The results of the aggregated calibration of the model parameters are presented and discussed in the paper.