Daily Mobilities Research Articles

Transformation of informal elder care practices and mobilities during the pandemic

ABSTRACT The COVID-19 pandemic revealed that when formal care services closed down, informal care burden was unequally transferred to women. Women across the world became part of “caregiver pools”. Using textual archive material collected by the Finnish Literature Society, we analyse the transformation of informal elder care practices in Finland. We adopt a care mobility and care process perspective to analyse how informal elder care was transformed due to social distancing measures that restricted ageing individuals and their family members’ local and translocal mobilities. We find that over 70-year-olds had to adapt their daily mobilities according to risk assessment. Caregiving provided by mostly female family members was replaced by digital care at a distance, which reinforced existing inequalities in care. We argue that the pandemic simultaneously brought about both a time–space compression and what we call a time–space expansion that affected the everyday practices and mobilities of care.

Mapping mobility in Namibia’s secondary cities informal settlements: a case study of rehoboth

ABSTRACT Many cities in Africa are experiencing rapid urbanization where mobility is a catalyst for change. Road infrastructure, especially highways, is being constructed and expanded to ease the flow of motorized traffic especially in primary cities. Little attention, however, is given to the mobility of inhabitants in secondary cities and more so in informal settlements located in these secondary cities. This research explores how the inhabitants of Block H settlement in Rehoboth navigate their daily mobilities. Rehoboth is a satellite city south of Windhoek in Namibia, that is currently experiencing rapid urbanization and demographic change. Through a participatory mapping approach, the study identifies key areas of access for the inhabitants, the challenges they face in accessing these areas, and the opportunities that present themselves for a better mobility landscape within the settlement and around Rehoboth. Journeys to work and shopping are characterized by longer distances, primarily due to their location in the town center, while journeys to school and leisure activities are relatively shorter, benefiting from their proximity to the Block H settlement. Public transport is provided by individuals who operate shared taxis within the town, although these have limitations in terms of accessibility, affordability, and coverage within the settlements, making mobility altogether costly.

Challenging the Gender Neutrality of On-Demand Mobility Platforms

In this article we chart a conceptual path to challenge the presumed gender neutrality of on-demand mobility platforms (ODMPs) as an effort to unlock an entry point for feminist critiques and interventions. Drawing on the Foucauldian notion of dispositif, the ODMP is theorized as a “platform assemblage”—a complex sociotechnical system encompassing the digital and the nondigital stack that are mutually constituted in a contingent, relational, and contextual way. We employed a quantitative feminist approach to unpacking the “black-boxed” gender neutrality of the sociotechnical system. We argue that the gender nonneutrality is more than merely a symptom of the immanent masculinist propensities of ODMPs, but also the origin and organ that simultaneously represent the phenomena, processes, and products of how the gender relations of power operate through digitally mediated mobilities, while contextually, relationally, and rhizomatically coopting into and with other always-already gendered social categories. We first argue that gendered practices and processes of digitally mediated mobilities and gender nonneutrality of ODMPs in the digital stack are relational and mutually constituted. ODMPs actively abstract extant gender inequalities in daily mobilities into “idiotic” data derivatives, feeding and propagating into the platform demand and pricing calculi that algorithmically prioritize mobile and masculine subjects, perpetuating or amplifying gender inequalities in digitally mediated mobilities. The digital presences and practices of ODMPs create new temporalities and spatialities of daily mobilities that are perceived as gender-specific time–space fixity and flexibility. Furthermore, ODMP-mediated mobilities have not fundamentally disrupted the conservative gendered power relations at home, and the masculinist form of control over familial automobility.

Did Liberal Lockdown Policies Change Spatial Behaviour in Sweden? Mapping Daily Mobilities in Stockholm Using Mobile Phone Data During COVID-19

Sweden had the most liberal lockdown policies in Europe during the Covid-19 pandemic. Relying on individual responsibility and behavioural nudges, their effectiveness was questioned from the perspective of others who responded with legal restrictions on behaviour. In this study, using mobile phone data, we therefore examine daily spatial mobilities in Stockholm to understand how they changed during the pandemic from their pre-pandemic baseline given this background. The analysis demonstrates: that mobilities did indeed change but with some variations according to (a) the residential social composition of places and (b) their locations within the city; that the changes were long lasting; and that the average fall in spatial mobility across the whole was not caused by everybody moving less but instead by more people joining the group of those who stayed close to home. It showed, furthermore, that there were seasonal differences in spatial behaviour as well as those associated with major religious or national festivals. The analysis indicates the value of mobile phone data for spatially fine-grained mobility research but also shows its weaknesses, namely the lack of personal information on important covariates such as age, gender, and education.

Friendly Nations and Open Borders: Gender, Caste and Sacredness at the India-Nepal Border

The postcolonial legacy of India’s borderlands is a legacy of othering, particularly of the religious other (meaning, other than Hindu). The ‘friendly’ India-Nepal border, however, negotiates the sameness of religion by managing the refractions of caste and gender. The shared sacredness of the landscape reproduced in the circulation of icons, myths and pilgrims also reaffirms the shared religious identity of those crossing it. This paper argues that the sameness that constitutes friendliness at this border rests on evaluating the gendered and caste righteousness of those crossing it. It is rendered most visible in alleged instances of elopement, marital infidelity and trafficking that come into public view at the open and friendly border. The paper describes how sameness is both refracted and managed through the observation of the daily mobilities and spatiality at the India-Nepal border at two check-points in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand.

Learning from informal gendered mobilities: Towards a holistic understanding for experimenting with city streets

This paper argues that the right to access public spaces and streets is impacted not only because of automobility but also by socio-spatial factors of the urban environment. This paper presents insights towards a holistic understanding for street experiments (with a focus on stationary and slow travel modes) by highlighting the factors that impact the conditions of mobility and access through the lens of gender. By adopting a combination of new technologies, such as GPS, along with mobile methods, like ethnography, this research centres around the everyday travel experiences of urban marginalized women (UMW) from peri‑urban areas of New Delhi who contest their right to access public spaces on a day-to-day basis. This study examines the socio-spatial environment comprising the daily mobilities of UMW to reveal the conditions of mobility and access to public spaces. The findings highlight that the issues faced by these women while travelling, mainly guided by aspects of gender, act as barriers to their mobility and access to public spaces (streets) in urban informal conditions. The study also reveals elements of urban informality (socio-spatial elements) enhance as well as negatively on the daily mobilities of UMW. These socio-spatial factors were found to be interconnected to one another and thus cannot be implemented as individual or isolated factors. The results of the study support the proposal of a more inclusive and accessible public space.

Daily mobilities with smartphone apps and their failures: A study in urban Guangzhou

The key purpose of this article is to provide a nuanced understanding of the platform-city-people nexus shaped by digitally mediated mobilities. This article focuses on urban practices of walking, driving and ride-hailing with mobile technologies and their failures on an everyday basis in urban Guangzhou (a megacity in south China), based on an analysis of both quantitative and qualitative data collected from the fieldwork in 2021. It finds that digitally mediated mobilities can be seen as everyday digital practices which are simultaneously produced and reproduced through everyday encounters with platforms and their breakdowns, places, and people's knowledge, skills, and imaginations in both digital and physical spaces. Moreover, digital platforms, as well as their failures, affect daily mobilities in contradictory ways. On the one hand, digital platforms mediate and reshape the time-space of people's daily mobilities and make people adjust and adapt their practices to the logic of platforms. While on the other hand, they allow people to creatively produce valuable data for themselves and enhance their skills of re-organising their mobilities with smartphone apps efficiently. These findings can advance digital geographies' understanding of the complex, contingent and messy relations between digital platforms, urban spaces and everyday practices.

CAPITALITE, CENTRALITE ET VULNERABILITES DANS LE DISTRICT AUTONOME DABIDJAN (COTE DIVOIRE)

Planning decisions designed to reinforce Abidjans status as a capital city and decision-making and business center have resulted in a concentric, monocentric territorial configuration. The article analyzes the daily mobilities generated by this monocentricity, inherent in the choice of symbolic amenities as producers of negative externalities. These negative externalities such as pollution, road insecurity, monetary and time losses, soil artificialization, social or spatial inequity and loss of accessibility are factors of territorial vulnerabilites. The transition from an exacerbated monocentricity to a polycentric, multimodal or rather multinodal system, through the emergence of new territorial nodes and urban hubs, will provide a sustainable impetus to this capital territory of Cote dIvoire.

A family perspective on daily (im)mobilities and gender-disability intersectionality in Sweden

Women usually have more complex mobilities than men do, not least if having young children in need of mobility provision. Moreover, travelling can be more challenging if having a disability, and parents of disabled children usually face many constraints in relation to everyday mobility, which implies that mothers of disabled children might experience gender-disability intersectionality in relation to mobility. This paper is based on interviews with mothers with wheelchair-using children living in Sweden and explores intersectionality from a family perspective – gender of the mother and disability of a child. The paper is based on time geography, especially focusing on the competition between time-geographical projects in everyday life. The findings suggest that gender-disability intersectionality affect the mothers’ geographical freedom and can imply both increased mobility and immobility in their lives.

Autonomous technologies for daily personal mobilities

This article attempts to point to emerging future trends for personal mobilities, focusing on the current and upcoming uses of autonomous technologies for both physical and virtual mobilities. These uses will be based on electricity and the Internet, which also constitute mobility modes. The article presents first each of the four emerging mobility technologies: electric vehicles (EVs), mobile Internet, autonomous vehicles (AVs), and artificial intelligence (AI) via chatbots. This is followed by a discussion of habit changes in the adoption of the four new mobility technologies. The article then moves to discussions of individual, societal, and spatial implications of the two mobility autonomous technologies of AV and AI. For individuals, autonomous physical and virtual mobilities will both be typified by rather restricted roles and activities by users, such as passengers and text users respectively. At the social level autonomous mobility will have a major impact on education, both generally, requiring students to analyze texts rather than to author them, and professionally, with growing needs for computer experts rather than traditional garage workers. It is too early to assess some possible spatial impacts of chatbots, but AVs will imply several spatial implications, notably regarding the structure of urban streets and parking facilities.

Dimensions of women’s mobility, livelihoods and vulnerability in artisanal and small-scale mining-induced local economy

Dominant artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) narratives highlight the invisibility of women’s livelihoods and gendered struggles in the sector. Indeed, livelihood practices in ASM, how daily mobilities facilitate these practices and the specific vulnerabilities women face are still understudied and undertheorised. Drawing on qualitative research in Prestea-Bondaye mining area (PBMA), Ghana, we explore the livelihood dimensions, forms of mobility and vulnerabilities of women in ASM from an open rural economy perspective where ASM serves as a centrifugal force that pulls or drives the emergence and sustenance of both farm and other off-farm livelihood activities. Our findings highlight two forms of mobility (i.e. outside the mining communities to ASM spaces, and to/within the mining communities) that are tied to different livelihood practices and vulnerabilities. From our inquiry, women build livelihoods in an ASM-induced local economy in three different forms: permanent, temporary, and indirect. The indirect livelihoods women build in an ASM-induced local economy include: 1) ‘san ban ho’ (side-work livelihood based on credit conditions), 2) petty-trading in ASM spaces, 3) home-based trading, 4) market-day trading, 5) commuting trading, and 6) underground pit ‘ghetto’ sponsorship. The findings show that while daily mobility shape the viability of livelihood-building efforts in an ASM-induced local economy, in most cases women experience different social and economic vulnerabilities that impact their health and livelihood benefits. Implications of our findings for policy and practice are further discussed.

Unique times, unequal mobilities: Daily mobility during the de‐escalation of the COVID‐19 pandemic

AbstractScholars have highlighted drastic reductions in daily mobility during the early stages of the COVID‐19 pandemic lockdown. But what happened when restrictions were relaxed though risk remained ubiquitous? How did patterns of mobility change and how were they structured by socioeconomic resources and social roles? We address these questions using a cross‐sectional representative sample (n = 2942) of the population of Andalusia, Spain, after a month and a half of severe lockdown in 2020. We find that older people were the least mobile group and that people living with children and in extended households were less likely to move to take care of others, unlike before the pandemic. Men were more likely to carry out daily mobilities for which women had been traditionally responsible, such as care mobilities. Women were also more likely to be immobile and less likely to commute. Finally, manual and nonqualified workers were more likely to commute, but they were just as likely as any other group to carry out other types of mobility. These results highlight the social character of mobility in a unique context. We emphasize the need to disaggregate daily mobility based on different purposes as well analysing how these are practised by different sociodemographic groups if we want to provide rigorous descriptions of a core component of individuals’ daily life.

On the Road of Hijrah: Contesting Identity through Urban Mobilities in Contemporary Indonesian Muslims

This article analyses how the hijrah movement, a contemporary religious movement that reinterprets the meaning and practices of being pious, has gained widespread sympathy among Indonesian urban Muslims. Although numerous studies have endeavoured to scrutinize the phenomenon of hijrah in communities or movements, most focus on social media, and only a few examine their daily mobilities in urban life. By focusing on the Kajian Musawarah, one of Indonesia’s most prominent hijrah communities and employing interdependent mobilities, the article reveals those activists and followers of such community contest new Islamic identities through their intersections with various forms of urban mobilities. Within physical, imaginative, virtual, and communicative travel, the Kajian Musawarah amplifies the symbolic value of hijrah over Islamic attributes, including clothing, language and recitation circles to attract urban Muslims. Furthermore, their Islamic identity is also contesting many aspects of social life such as urban lifestyle, consumptive culture, and relation to other Muslim and non-Muslim communities.

Is there greater ethnic mixing in residential or workplace spaces?

ABSTRACT While much of the ethnic and racial segregation literature concentrates on residential neighbourhoods, a growing body of research demonstrates how levels of inter-ethnic mixing vary between home and other spaces, including workplace environments. Using alternative population bases from the 2011 Census for England and Wales, we explore how levels of ethnic segregation and diversity compare for working-age people in residential (‘nighttime’), workday (‘daytime’) and workplace (‘employment’) environments. Analyses of Middle Layer Super Output Areas reveal that a larger number of these zones had low residential ethnic diversity than had low workday or workplace diversity. We also find higher levels of residential segregation than workplace segregation for all ethnic groups, including the White British (majority) and minoritised groups. Notable differences in segregation between residential and workplace spaces for the Pakistani and Bangladeshi ethnic groups, for example, demonstrate that more commonly applied measures of residential segregation fail to capture the extent of inter-ethnic mixing across spaces, and at different times of the day. Commuting data are analysed to explore the role of daily mobilities in shaping these patterns. The findings nuance understandings of levels of ethnic mixing, and emphasise the need for segregation analyses across multiple spatio-temporal contexts.

Personal Spatial Mobilities after the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Speculative View

ABSTRACT This article attempts to speculate on possible post-COVID-19 pandemic scenarios for daily and periodic touristic personal mobilities. Post-COVID-19 pandemic mobilities are assumed to reflect people’s basic needs for mobilities, their pre-pandemic, and pandemic mobility experiences, as well as societal-economic forces pushing for changes in mobility patterns. The article begins with explorations for the basic personal push and pull triggers for both daily and touristic mobilities, which can be assumed to have remained unchanged during and after the Coronavirus crisis. We then assess the significances of the COVID-19-related lockdowns, with some special attention given to new mobility habit formations, highlighting the differences between macro-societal imposed habit formations, typical to the pandemic, as compared to individual voluntary habit formations, typical of routine habit formations by individuals. It is speculated that the pre-COVID-19 physical and virtual mobility mix for social contacts will continue, added by virtual group meetings. Post-pandemic shopping will present growth of virtual, as compared to physical, shopping. Home-based work, which was modest before COVID-19, will become widely adopted following the end of the COVID-19 crisis. Finally, we argue for a post-pandemic increased need for touristic vacations, and daily leisure activities at times of more extensive home-based work.

Mapping the anxiety of digitally mediated mobilities in the mundane

This article focuses on the ‘small moments’ of digitally mediated mobilities in the mundane. Drawing on a qualitative GIS analysis of people’s walking, driving and ride-hailing in urban Guangzhou (a megacity in south China), this article maps the complex and dynamic anxieties from a social practice perspective. It argues that anxieties of daily mobilities are entangled with digital practices of reducing, removing or producing future uncertainties, as well as those of generating instant confusion of the digital/data during the management and organisation of familiar routines. The key findings of this study suggest that anxieties of digitally mediated mobilities are situated knowledges generated by the temporalities, spatialities and socialities of daily movements. These complex, contingent and dynamic anxieties are coped with improvisationally. These findings can bring new insights into mobilities studies by constructing an understanding of the co-constitution of embodied and emotional movements and mobile technologies in the digital mundane.

A scoping review of the daily mobilities of older adults in the Global South

This review examines the current state of the literature on the daily mobility patterns of older adults in the Global South to discover what is known and uncover dominant themes. We used a scoping review approach to search literature in geography and other allied disciplines that primarily focus on elderly daily travel behaviours and related studies. We included 57 papers to review and identified three dominant themes across them: trip mode choice, unmet mobility needs, and socio‐economic aspects of mobility. Results show that the elderly in the Global South, in contrast to their peers in the Global North, walk and use public transportation more frequently than personal vehicles. Some common unmet mobility needs of the elderly in the Global South include safety concerns, gender inequalities, and unequal access to public transportation. Socio‐economic aspects that influence elderly mobilities include employment status, living arrangements, caregiving relationships, and social networks. We conclude that there is a need for more mobility studies that promote the participation of older adults in the Global South and that use longitudinal, qualitative, and/or mixed method approaches. Lastly, transportation policies should address specific elderly needs and avoid “one‐size fits all” approaches.

Living with urban sounds: Understanding the effects of human mobilities on individual sound exposure and psychological health

People’s exposure to high levels of sound leads to psychological annoyance and stress. This study seeks to understand and conceptualize how human daily mobilities influence urban residents’ sound exposure and psychological health involving annoyance and stress in their everyday lives. Human daily mobilities are understood as people’s daily movement patterns and potentials for movements. Using a mixed-method approach, data were collected from 32 participants in a mixed-housing community in suburban Beijing in China. Each participant carried a portable sound sensor and a GPS tracker and recorded activity-travel diaries for a weekday and a weekend day to track their daily space–time trajectories, measured sound levels, and details of each daily activity and trip. Further, in-depth interviews were conducted to understand participants’ perceptions of urban sounds and psychological health during their daily movements. Geo-narrative analysis was used to integrate these multiple data sources and gain an in-depth understanding of participants’ daily mobilities, individual sound exposures, and perceptions of sound and psychological health. This exploratory study finds that urban residents are exposed to different sound levels and sources in multiple urban geographic contexts in the course of their day. Further, this study identifies how socially vulnerable and susceptible residents encounter difficulties in escaping from high levels of sound in different urban contexts due to their space–time constraints. This study not only enriches the knowledge of how human daily mobilities can influence individual-based sound exposure and psychological health. It also highlights the need to provide better sonic environments for socially vulnerable and susceptible groups in cities.

Changing Suburban Daily Mobilities in Response to a Mobility Intervention: A Qualitative Investigation of an E-bike Trial

This paper explores how local mobility interventions can bring about changes in daily mobilities and presents a qualitative study of an intervention introducing electric bikes (e-bikes) to suburban commuters in Norway. Our research shows promising evidence that e-bikes could play a crucial role in achieving a sustainable transport transition and that interventions are essential to stimulate the upscaling and mainstreaming of this emerging low-energy transport mode. In order to understand the scheme’s capacity to change mobility outcomes, this paper considers (i) how this low-energy mobility intervention was conceived and undertaken by its initiators, as well as how it was experienced by its participants; and (ii) how new e-bike practices are intertwined with existing daily activities and mobility systems. Theoretically, this paper draws on the staging mobilities framework and conceptualizes situational mobilities as involving the dimensions of embodiment, social interaction, and materiality. With this twofold objective, this paper generates crucial knowledge that is required to understand the capacity of mobility interventions to trigger a sustainable transport transition. This study explores the potential of combining mobile methods (GPS-tracking), qualitative GIS, and visual methods (photo- and map-elicitation) in interviews, and participant observations.

Spatial discontinuities, health and mobility

The general objective of this paper is to discuss strong spatial discontinuities in Asian megacities and their potential effects, notably in terms of population health. The factors for exposure to risks vary in the life of individuals, whether it is over a long period of residential migrations or a short one of daily mobility. In the context of dengue epidemics, it is this second modality of urban mobility that interests us as it helps to differentiate exposure to the virus among individuals, beyond those related to their places of residence. This reflection relies on exploration of original datasets designed to better characterize the structures and dynamics in cities where the researcher did not have access to spatialized data until recently. The spread of Internet, smartphones and applications open to geo-localization, has helped to create new opportunities for collecting data. In this paper, we propose to explore POI (Point of Interest) data from Google and the Twitter social network to develop a typology of activities of the city of Bangkok and to measure its tempo/pulsations more appropriately through daily mobilities.