The Role Of Relative Accessibility In Urban Built Environment Change

Location of real estate projects is one of the most important decisions to be made at the beginning of any development process. Once a property is constructed, it is attached to the place throughout the whole life cycle. Nevertheless, it also keeps affecting subsequent location decisions of other investments in the neighbourhood. Therefore, the development site selection behaviour, agglomerated at the city scale, transforms urban built environment pattern. In the literature, it is argued that knowing relative accessibility helps in understanding the morphogenetic process. Several techniques focusing on spatial configuration are usually used to explore relative accessibility of the components integrated in the urban structures and to explain how potential spatial interactions between people using these structures are affected. Furthermore, simulation models of the built environment change also suggest a critical influence of accessibility. In this context, the explanation power of relative location within the urban structures is supported by many studies. In this paper, we examine the relationship between relative accessibility and built environment density in Bratislava, Slovakia, with its emerging real estate market between 1991 and 2006. The early post-socialist development is generally considered with the less powerful regulation, which enables a virtually free competition for urban land. Our first hypothesis is that the best connected locations are more attractive subject to competition resulting in higher built environment density. Our second hypothesis is that the transition period covered by data documents a process of density gradient restoration driven significantly by relative accessibility.