Impact of land use mix on neighborhood accessibility: a case study, Bhopal

Abstract

Land Use Mix refers to locating different types of land uses close together. This can occur at various scales, including mixing within buildings, along streets, and within neighbourhood’s. The land use mix has its major impact at the neighbourhood level accessibility. All the facilities and amenities at this level directly affect the households each of these have different thresholds and ranges (i.e. threshold refers to the area specified under norms for the facilities and range is the actual area served by the facilities in a neighbourhood). This varies as the land use and level of service changes. The impact analysis is done by using a model generated which involves the assessment of the accessibility to the neighbourhood facilities through physical neighbourhood characteristics and the residents’ attitudes and perceptions. This involves the mapping of the facilities, mapping the area to be served (according to the norms) and overlapping it with the actual area served by each facility which depends on the residents’ perception. The neighbourhood facilities include eight domains i.e. education, transport, financial, recreational, social & cultural, health, food retails and other retail activities which are further divided into sub-domains. The present study is conducted to analyze the impact of land use mix on accessibility within the neighbourhood of Bhopal. The city has multiple nuclei with varied type of neighbourhood’s and the population. The city is experiencing the land use mix in major areas. Thus, two neighbourhoods in Bhopal city with varied characteristics and origin are taken as the study areas. One is the Part Of Core City or the old city experiencing both horizontal and vertical land use mix evolved during 300 years of its existence; On the contrary Arera colony (study area two) is the planned residential colony experiencing majorly vertical land use mix laid in 1960’s. The study analyzed the level of accessibility of domain wise facilities for the neighbourhood, the reasons for the presence of different type of land use mix. And an understanding on impact of variation of the neighbourhood accessibility due to different type of land use mix.