  Disparity in spatial accessibility is strongly associated with growing
inequalities among urban communities. Since improving levels of accessibility
for certain communities can provide them with upward social mobility and
address social exclusion and inequalities in cities, it is important to
understand the nature and distribution of spatial accessibility among urban
communities. To support decision-makers in achieving inclusion and fairness in
policy interventions in cities, we present an open-source and data-driven
framework to understand the spatial nature of accessibility to infrastructure
among the different demographics. We find that accessibility to a wide range of
infrastructure in any city (54 cities) converges to a Zipf's law, suggesting
that inequalities also appear proportional to growth processes in these cities.
Then, assessing spatial inequalities among the socioeconomically clustered
urban profiles for 10 of those cities, we find urban communities are distinctly
segregated along social and spatial lines. We find low accessibility scores for
populations who have a larger share of minorities, earn less, and have a
relatively lower number of individuals with a university degree. These findings
suggest that the reproducible framework we propose may be instrumental in
understanding processes leading to spatial inequalities and in supporting
cities to devise targeted measures for addressing inequalities for certain
underprivileged communities.
