The long and winding road: combining least cost paths and network analysis techniques for settlement location analysis and predictive modelling

In this paper, we describe an exploratory analysis of the possibilities of combining least cost path analysis and network analysis techniques. Accessibility is a potentially important site location factor. So far, the definition of accessibility has been approached through the creation of accumulated cost surfaces and least cost paths. However, these methods do not provide direct information on the foci of movement. Starting from networks created from least cost paths, network analysis and space syntax were used to obtain additional information on the structural features of the network. It is concluded that both techniques can be used with least cost path-based networks, and will provide new insights into the characteristics of the network. For most applications however the Space syntax measures that take the geographical dimension into account seem to be preferable to the simple network analysis measures used here.