Activity-based simulations for neighbourhood planning towards social-spatial equity

Journal article, 2025

Urban planners use static analysis techniques like network and proximity analysis to evaluate a neighbourhood's accessibility. However, these techniques do not adequately capture the distributional effects of accessibility on individuals. This paper introduces an activity-based model that simulates residents' daily activities to assess the distributional effects of the built environment (BE) on their accessibility. The model consists of a pipeline to generate a synthetic population covering 96 neighbourhoods in Gothenburg, Sweden, performs origin and destination assignment, and supports four travel modes and different activity types. The synthetic population and the travel demand model are validated across demographic and travel survey data. Additionally, we introduce Trip Completion Rate (TCR), an indicator of distributional accessibility and apply our model to a proposed redevelopment plan for a neighbourhood in Gothenburg to demonstrate its utility.
The results show that techniques used in transportation research can be effectively applied to neighbourhood planning, providing planners with insights into residents' ability to fulfil their daily needs. An advantage of our model is its ability to generate synthetic residents for a neighbourhood and then simulate how changes in the BE affect the resident's ability to achieve their daily needs, thus switching the focus of the analysis from the neighbourhood BE to including the residents that live in it. This paper extends the application of techniques used in transportation planning to neighbourhood planning, thereby empowering urban planners to create more equitable neighbourhoods.