Quantifying and Visualizing Access to Food in the Areas with Dispersed Settlements in Slovakia: Case Study Novobanská Stálova Area

Dispersed settlement is a residential area that has been preserved in the mountainous and sub-mountainous regions of Slovakia. In this paper, we will focus on the analysis of food retailing as a subsystem of the local food system in an environment where residents are socially and geographically disadvantaged when purchasing food. The aim of the research was to find out the state of the food retail network, to quantify it through traditional indicators of the sales area, areal and service parameters, and to visualize the time availability to food stores in the Novobanská štálova region. The retail network of food stores in this area can be evaluated as very logically distributed. There is at least one grocery store in every village. The most numerous sales network in the region is the Slovak chain Coop Jednota, which is represented by up to 20 stores out of a total of 38. In terms of the size of the stores, small shops with a sales area of 51 to 200 m² predominate. As many as 1038 inhabitants of the studied region live within walking distance of more than 20 minutes, i.e. at an unfavorable distance to the nearest food, this represents 4.15%, but up to 52.4% of the inhabitants of settlements (štály). The biggest problems were surprisingly evident in the centers of Nová Ba ň a and Žarnovica, where, in addition to some of the dispersed settlements, their urban areas also found themselves in food deserts.