Urban Accessibility and Connectivity of Employment Centers in Culiacan

Abstract

The analysis of access to opportunities in the city is the objective of the evolution of the mobility paradigm into an accessibility paradigm. This analysis is framed in the theories of the monocentric city and the network centrality as an approach to accessibility based on road infrastructure supporting travel. This study focuses on the concentration of work activities and connectivity as a quality of the relevant links between employment and the employed population. For the connectivity approach, four different centrality measures were used by means of GIS processing tools: closeness, degree of centrality, betweenness and “eigenvector”, searching for a multiple analysis of the network. With regard to the concentration of work in the city, the applied methods to identify urban sub-centers were: employment density peaks in contiguous areas and concentration thresholds. Information from INEGI, available at the national level in Mexico, was used for all these methods. The results quantitatively reveal the connectivity features of the city network and the strength of the urban center due to the concentration of jobs and connectivity. In the same way for each employment center, according to the number of job positions occupied, employed population with potential accessibility and the connectivity of its service area, expressed by the different forms of centrality.