Measuring Accessibility with GIS-Tools: A Case Study of the Wild Coast of South Africa

Although most GIS-based planning support have the capacity to show the location and attributes of different places, very few GIS-based systems are able to describe adequately the degree of spatial interaction, or the geographic accessibility, between places. The Faculty of Geographical Sciences of the Utrecht University (The Netherlands) and the South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), are developing a methodology to address the problem of measuring accessibility by integrating specialised GIS software (FlowMap) that measures the geographic accessibility between locations within a spatial decision support system (AccessMap). The resulting GIS-tool is applied to the Wild Coast area in South Africa. In this region a lack of accessibility to market centres is perceived as one of the major constraints of economic development in the region.