Comparing two distance measures in the spatial mapping of food deserts: The case of Petržalka, Slovakia

Over the last twenty years or so, researchers’ attention to the issue of food deserts has increased in the geographical literature. Accessibility to large-scale retail units is one of the essential and frequently-used indicators leading to the identification and mapping of food deserts. Numerous accessibility measures of various types are available for this purpose. Euclidean distance and street network distance rank among the most frequently-used approaches, although they may lead to slightly different results. The aim of this paper is to compare various approaches to the accessibility to food stores and to assess the differences in the results gained by these methods. Accessibility was measured for residential block centroids, with applications of various accessibility measures in a GIS environment. The results suggest a strong correspondence between Euclidean distance and a little more accurate street network distance approach, applied in the case of the urban environment of Bratislava-Petržalka, Slovakia.