CEE Seminar - The Myth of Access: Affordability, Perception, and the Reality of Infrastructure Equity

Access to essential services (such as water, energy, and food) is often measured in physical terms: distance to infrastructure, connection rates, or service reliability. Yet, these spatial metrics overlook key social, economic, and behavioral factors that determine whether access is meaningful in practice. This talk explores quantatative methods for quantifying non-physical dimensions of access, including affordability, perceived quality, and user acceptability. In the first half, I demonstrate how water rate structures shape affordability and household vulnerability across income groups and how affordability is exacerbated by drought and water system investment decisions. In the second half, I will present ongoing research on "aspatial access," which uses LLMs to capture how perceptions and preferences influence the effective accessibility of essential services, with a specific focus on food access in Raleig