This is a research paper I recently presented at the 11th Space Syntax Symposium in Lisbon, co-authored with Stephen Law and Laurens Versluis.
The paper has been reformatted for re-production here and the original published version can be found here .
Abstract
This paper describes an exploratory methodology used to study the national scale issues of population growth and infrastructure implementation across the UK. The project was carried out for the Government Office for Science in 2015, focussing on two key questions: how could a “spatially driven” scenario provoke new thinking on accommodating forecast growth, and; what would be the impact of transport infrastructure investments within this context.
Addressing these questions required the construction of a national scale spatial model that also needed to integrate datasets on population and employment. Models were analysed and profiled initially to identify existing relationships between the distribution of population and employment against the spatial network. Based on these profiles, an experimental methodology was used to firstly identify cities with the potential to accommodate growth, then secondly to allocate additional population proportionally. This raises important questions for discussion around which cities provide the benchmark for growth and why, as well as what the optimal spatial conditions for population growth may be, and how this growth should be accommodated locally.
Later the model was used to study the impact of High Speed Rail. As these proposed infrastructure changes improve service (capacity, frequency, journey time), rather than creating new topological connections, the model was adapted to be able to produce time based catchments as an output. These catchments could then be expressed in terms of the workforce population within an hour of every city (a potential travel to work area), as well as the number of employment opportunities within an hour of every household.
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