Urban Form and Job Access: Disparate Realities in the Randstad

Maarten van Ham, Pieter Hooimeijer and Clara H. Mulder

Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, 2001, vol. 92, issue 2, 231-246

Abstract: Deconcentration of employment is the driving force behind the rise of the complex urban forms of the polycentric city and the polynucleated metropolis. It is often assumed that the deconcentration process improves job access for average and highly skilled workers, allowing them to move to peripheral residential locations and triggering a new round of urban sprawl. It is also hypothesised that access to suitable job opportunities is withheld from low‐skilled workers living in inner‐city neighbourhoods as a result of the deconcentration of low‐skilled employment beyond their commuting tolerance. In this contribution we illustrate how network‐oriented GIS provides an instrument to enable the evaluation of the job access of residential locations at varying levels of commuting tolerance and for various types of employment. Application of this instrument to the metropolitan area of the Randstad shows that suburban locations in between major employment centres are clearly superior for households with highly skilled workers, making urban sprawl towards residential locations outside the Randstad unlikely. It is also shown that for poorly skilled workers with limited commuting tolerance the central city is still the best place to live.

Date: 2001
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9663.00152

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:tvecsg:v:92:y:2001:i:2:p:231-246

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0040-747X

Access Statistics for this article

Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie is currently edited by Jan van Weesep

More articles in Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie from Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().