Action space as planning concept in spatial planning

Society is becoming more and more complex. This shows up in an increasing diversity of activity and mobility patterns of individuals, households, companies and organizations. In a network society, the significance of physical distance declines as the importance of available time increases. Many spatial planning concepts like ‘location policy’ and ‘the compact city’ and the criteria of accessibility do not take these developments sufficiently into account. This reduces the effectiveness of mobility and spatial policy. Spatial planning can benefit from deeper insight into the time-space options that individuals have. For that reason, planners need concepts that help them to understand the behaviour of individual actors and to influence them at the local and regional level. One such concept is action space: the area within which persons can undertake activities. This paper presents the theoretical backgrounds of this concept. A typology of action space for dual-income households with children, living in two Dutch municipalities, is constructed and analyzed. In addition, a model of action space, called MASTIC, is developed. This model allows planners to determine the degree to which the action spaces of individuals can be influenced. Some applications of the model are discussed: to identify the mobility effects of urban form; to coordinate services at the local level; and, finally, to assess the influence of demographic, cultural and economic developments on the composition of the population and thereby to study the aggregate mobility effects of an area. Martin Dijst (1957) is an associate professor of urban geography at the Urban Research center Utrecht (URU), Faculty of Geographical Sciences, Utrecht University in the Netherlands. His research activities are focused on transportation studies. He is particularly interested in the relation between urbanization, infrastructure and the activity/travel patterns of specific population categories. In 1995 he completed his Ph.D. dissertation entitled “An elliptical life” in which he treats action space as an integral measure of accessibility and mobility.