Accessibility of public services in districts of Warsaw: a comparative study

Abstract

The aim of this work is to verify whether accessibility to public services in city districts of Warsaw, corresponds to real-estate prices. We introduce a new index named the “Urban Services Accessibility Index” (USAI) which compares the availability of public services within districts of a city in three dimensions: access to healthcare, access to education, and availability of public transport. We found that the districts of Śródmieście, Ochota and Żoliborz have the highest apartment prices and USAI values. Warsaw exhibits a clear distance-decay pattern in USAI values which correlates well with average apartment prices. This pattern results from poor development of public services in peripheral city districts (e.g. Bemowo, Białołęka, Wilanów) while the central district of Śródmieście stands out as the unquestionable leader in terms of accessibility to the mentioned services. USAI proved itself to be a robust method in the comparative analysis of city districts’ development.

Keywords

• socio-economic inequalities
• public services
• warsaw
• city districts
• distance-decay pattern