Accessibility of public services in the age of ageing and shrinking population: are regions following trends

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the characteristics and functional-demographic diversity of municipalities in Poland that use spatial data. It answers the question about the relationship between accessibility to services of general interest (SGI; public administration, child-care, educational, medical, and cultural services) in municipalities and their demographic conditions. Demographic literature devotes much space to demographic transformations in the context of their underlying causes and spatial variations and to the impact of these changes. Meanwhile, transport-focused approaches concentrate on the spatial accessibility of SGI themselves, the methods for measuring them and the various methodologies employed. This study combines these two study areas in order to present the broadest possible approach to the accessibility of SGI among communities at different stages of demographic advancement. We found that the nature of demographic processes is associated with the level of accessibility to SGI. Notably, accessibility to educational and medical services in depopulating areas is better than in ageing areas. The opposite is true for cultural services. The poorest accessibility affects those communities where the two above demographic processes overlap. There is clear variation in the accessibility of SGI: functional urban areas having the best accessibility and remote areas the worst accessibility .

KEYWORDS:

• Accessibility
• services of general interest
• public services
• shrinking regions
• ageing
• depopulation

Acknowledgements

M. Stępniak would like to thank the Spanish Agencia Estatal de Investigación (Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades) and the European Social Fund for their financial support through the Ramón y Cajal Programme.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Centre (Poland) [DEC-2014/13/B/HS4/03495, DEC-2013/09/D/HS4/02679] and and Spanish Agencia Estatal de Investigación (Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades) [grant number: RYC-2017-22263].