Mapping and measuring urban-rural inequalities in accessibility to social infrastructures

Equal access to social infrastructures is a fundamental prerequisite for sustainable development, but has long been a great challenge worldwide. Previous studies have primarily focused on the accessibility to social infrastructures in urban areas across various scales, with less attention to rural areas, where inequality can be more severe. Particularly, few have investigated the disparities of accessibility to social infrastructures between urban and rural areas. Here, using the Changsha-Zhuzhou-Xiangtan urban agglomeration, China, as an example, we investigated the inequality of accessibility in both urban and rural areas, and further compared the urban-rural difference. Accessibility was measured by travel time of residents to infrastructures. We selected four types of social infrastructures including supermarkets, bus stops, primary schools, and health care, which were fundamentally important to both urban and rural residents. We found large disparities in accessibility between urban and rural areas, ranging from 20 min to 2 h. Rural residents had to spend one to two more hours to bus stops than urban residents, and 20 min more to the other three types of infrastructures. Furthermore, accessibility to multiple infrastructures showed greater urban-rural differences. Rural residents in more than half of the towns had no access to any infrastructure within 15 min, while more than 60% of the urban residents could access to all infrastructures within 15 min. Our results revealed quantitative accessibility gap between urban and rural areas and underscored the necessity of social infrastructures planning to address such disparities.