The Fuzzy Logic of Accessibility

Accessibility is a measure of association linking people (or places) with some target destination or node. In its most general formulation, accessibility is not limited to a strictly geographic interpretation. Thus, instead of spatial proximity, accessibility may represent the ease with which one may gain entry to certain social or communications networks. The rapid advent of emerging information technologies increases the imperative task for geographers and other social scientists to develop models that are sufficiently robust to accommodate the concept of accessibility in its physical, social, and technological manifestations. To that end, this paper examines the potential to combine the fuzzy logic of Zadeh (1965) and Kosko (1992) with the club theory of Tiebout (1956) and Buchanan (1965) to model accessibility in both geographic and non-geographic contexts.