Neighbourhoods and health: a GIS approach to measuring community resource accessibility

This study, conducted by Jamie Pearce, Karen Witten, Phil Bartie, looked at how accessible different communities were to different health related resources. They examined different resources such as: shopping, education, recreation, food stores, and health facilities. They broke down a map of an area like Christchurch by neighborhoods and looked at how far it would take different people in different neighborhoods to get to places.



They continued to use maps like this to come up with a general census of how far people are from these community resources. They found when looking at New Zealand as a whole the travel time for people coming from 'low accessibility' neighborhoods 23.22 minutes while coming from 'high accessibility' to being only 2.83 minutes. Although this is a very large gap this study examined different neighborhoods all across New Zealand both urban and rural.




Pearce, J., Witten, K., & Bartie, P. (2006). Neighbourhoods and health: a GIS approach to measuring community resource accessibility. Journal of epidemiology and community health, 60(5), 389-395.