Factor 4: Distance to important Shopping Centers

For the next factor I researched the locations of important Shopping Centers in GVRD and created a vector file using the digitizing function. The distance to major Shopping Centers is important due to the demand of episodical goods.



Again I transferred the Shopping Center vector file to a raster file using a blank image and pointras module and created Boolean values (1 for target points, 0 for rest) with the assign module. Afterwards I calculated absolute distances of all cells to the nearest Shopping Center.



The following picture shows the results. As the absolute distance in meters is not useful in our case I transferred it to the 255-scale using the scalar module.



The corrected legend looks like the following. for this I looked up the maximum value in the metadata and divided it by 255. In scalar I entered to divide by this value in order to get a range from 0 to 255.



In MCE I chose a sigmoidal monotonically decreasing function. This describes the relation of distance to the nearest Shopping Center best as there are a quite lot. Highest suitability is reached when living close to or between Shopping Centers. Relativeley the most efficient areas thus are near and far from the target areas but not at "half distance".



The final factor picture calculated by MCE (see above) shows absolute distances to major Shopping Centers but again not considering water barriers such as the Burrard Inlet, yet.