Evaluating Urban Poverty and its Relationship with Access to Services in Qazvin City

Exploring distribution of urban poverty in Qazvin city, accessibility to urban services in poor districts of the city, and evaluating the relationship between urban poverty and access to urban services are the purposes of the study. By reviewing urban poverty theoretical literature, the Amarita Sen (1981) definition for capability approach of poverty and multidimensional poverty index (MPI (, against the classic approaches or income poverty was addressed in the study. According to this approach, poverty is related to the accessibility of people to services which are desirable. In other words, while lack of income is not rejected as an important factor, enjoying sufficient income is not equal to be far from any deprivation for a certain individual/household. Dimensions of Urban Poverty regarding this approach are Income poverty, Health poverty, Education poverty, Tenure insecurity, Personal insecurity and Disempowerment. On the other hand, Lynch (1981(definition of accessibility is considered, which is "the ability of urban residences to have good access to activities, resources, services, information and alike". Most common accessibility measures are the well-known gravity potential formula, minimizing travel cost, covering objectives and minimum distance. In this study minimum distance model is used for measuring the accessibility, which is the distance between origin and a certain kind of services-for example a park. For distance calculations, the Euclidian distance or straight-line method is selected among other methods such as Manhattan block (distance along two sides of a right-angled triangle, the base of which is the Euclidian distance) or Network (shortest network paths). For exploring urban poverty distribution in the city of Qazvin, urban poverty indices are collected from literature review and finally 23 indices are selected, which by using factor analysis, these indices are transformed into three factors and then mapped in GIS. The three factors are named “dependent population”, “social housing deprivation” and “income deprivation”. Results show that urban poverty does not have an even distribution in the city and is mostly concentrated in south and west south of the city. Also surveys conducted in access to urban services by objective and subjective methods and factor analysis; reveal that some of urban services are not accessible for residents, especially the ones in poor areas. Objective method in here is based on drawing optimum radius for capturing function area of each urban services, applying GIS software while employing accessibility to services methods as mentioned above. Subjective method is accomplished through distributing questionnaire in poor districts of the city while the number of questionnaires and determining the districts are recognized using Neyman Allocation Method. Understanding the relationship between urban poverty and accessibility to urban services, separate linear regressions are applied in the poverty factors identified, the index of multiple deprivation (IMD) and five factors which are extracted from factor analysis of access to urban services. Using linear regression, indicates a meaningful relationship between urban poverty and accessibility to urban services, as index of multiple deprivation (IMD) correlates with “basic housing services” and “district level services” and there is a meaningful and direct relationship between them.