MAPPING DISTANCE AND TIME: LEVERAGING ISOCHRONE INTELLIGENCE IN EMERGING CITIES

Urban areas often face significant transportation challenges due to mixed land-use development and inadequate travel services, which exacerbate accessibility issues in metropolitan areas. This study focuses on Tirana, the capital of Albania, where residents everyday encounter difficulties in reaching their destinations. These challenges stem from the city’s growth patterns and a lack of planning regulations, leading to traffic congestion and irregular land-use configurations. In these terms, the research aims to quantify accessibility to the city center and other POI (Points of Interest) by using different modes of transportation at different times of the day. It also seeks to analyze the effectiveness of isochrones and tailored indicators in capturing the time-efficient performance of monocentric road networks. Contemporary platforms that provide advanced time- and distance-based accessibility tools can inform and calculate in real time, multi-modal journey times. Using demographic and housing data from Albania’s 2023 Census together with street-network and various transport layers we have generated multi-modal isochrones (walking, cycling, driving, transit) across multiple thresholds (10 - 30 minutes). This approach enables us to quantify population and amenity catchments, accessibility indices and examine the relationships between accessibility and local property values, while controlling for urban morphology indicators such as block typology, building height, and land use mix. As a result, we conduct a comparative analysis of outputs across different isochrone generations, evaluate their robustness and discuss the ethical and planning implications for equitable urban development and investment strategies.