Socially Sustainable Accessibility to Goods and Services in the Metropolitan Area of Concepción, Chile, Post-COVID-19

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic affected people’s mobility and access to urban activities. When the contagion was at a community level, quarantine measures were taken, causing population immobility. The lack of alternatives significantly altered the satisfaction of people’s basic needs. The objective of this article was to explore and generate real accessibility indicators for goods and services, in addition to the levels of spatial satisfaction of the population, at a regional level in the metropolitan area of Concepción, Chile. To focus on citizens’ social welfare, social geomarketing was applied as the method, obtaining the delimitation of accessibility areas for goods and services through population surveys and the delimited spatial decelerated satisfaction. Pre-pandemic and during-pandemic situations were evaluated. The results showed an improvement in the delimitation of accessibility areas of goods and services, as the citizens’ preferences as consumers were included, revealing an increment during the pandemic, especially in the food typology. In the same way, the existence of geospatial satisfaction and its increment under the pandemic context when accessing the diverse facilities that offer these kinds of goods was confirmed. In conclusion, the satisfaction areas were useful for analyzing urban form designs and focusing them to promote revitalization, as well as for inclusive and sustainable urbanization and proactive measures to make urban areas more resilient to natural or human risks, incorporating the role of geospatial tools for promoting sustainable urban development.