Mobile Perspective Research Articles

Assessing impacts of the built environment on mobility: A joint choice model of travel mode and duration

This paper introduces a joint choice model for travel mode and duration to quantify the mobility impacts of urban design changes on the built environment. The model is formulated as a Random Forest classifier that predicts the mode-duration probabilities of a given trip. A novel series of predictor features are proposed which measure the urban form, demographics, and service densities on different scales of the transportation network. Through a sensitivity analysis and a proof-of-concept case study, we find that a dense, mixed-use environment with good coverage of a multi-modal mobility network can significantly promote active transportation and public transit use. However, we also find that ultra-dense, centralized developments can lead to increased travel time and increased vehicle use in the urban periphery. Our modeling and analysis method provides a simplified and effective way to assess urban design and planning scenarios from different mobility perspectives and facilitates data-driven, mobility-aware urban design and planning that can help identify better solutions more quickly.

Interactive ship cabin layout optimization

Traditionally, the ship cabin layout is designed by experts with the help of CAD, GAD, etc. The layout is usually drawn and designed repeatedly, which is not only labor-intensive but also time-consuming. Although a layout is well-thought-out, potential design issues may still exist in practice. In recent years, some intelligent ship layout design algorithms are proposed. However, the capability of involving humans in the loop has been seriously overlooked in current studies, which are mostly end-to-end approaches. To resolve these challenges, we propose a novel interactive ship cabin layout optimization approach based on integer programming (IP), which is capable to generate diverse layouts and interact with designers for further refinement. Gurobi, an integer programming solver, is adopted to find out the optimal value under the layout constraints in our approach. Moreover, crowd simulation is used to evaluate the layout quality from the perspective of coziness and mobility. The results indicate the proposed method can effectively design and optimize the ship cabin layout in an interactive manner.

The spatial practice and identity construction of the Russian-speaking immigrants in Sanya from the perspective of mobility

The spatial practice and identity construction of the Russian-speaking immigrants in Sanya from the perspective of mobility

Structural firefighter personal protective clothing user needs in the US: a mobility perspective

Structural firefighter personal protective clothing user needs in the US: a mobility perspective

Quantifying COVID-19 recovery process from a human mobility perspective: An intra-city study in Wuhan.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought huge challenges to sustainable urban and community development. Although some recovery signals and patterns have been uncovered, the intra-city recovery process remains underexploited. This study proposes a comprehensive approach to quantify COVID-19 recovery leveraging fine-grained human mobility records. Taking Wuhan, a typical COVID-19 affected megacity in China, as the study area, we identify accurate recovery phases and select appropriate recovery functions in a data-driven manner. We observe that recovery characteristics regarding duration, amplitude, and velocity exhibit notable differences among urban blocks. We also notice that the recovery process under a one-wave outbreak lasts at least 84days and has an S-shaped form best fitted with four-parameter Logistic functions. More than half of the recovery variance can be well explained and estimated by common variables from auxiliary data, including population, economic level, and built environments. Our study serves as a valuable reference that supports data-driven recovery quantification for COVID-19 and other crises.

Mobility regulations and urban projects in Mexico City: An accessibility focus on territorial inequalities

Global Cities frequently concentrate their public budgets and private investments in their central, wealthy zones. This article outlines the inequitable distribution of the public budgets, private investments and mixed-use zoning among the municipalities of Mexico City with regard to the provision of accessibility. Global Cities’ perspectives lack acknowledgement of elements of mobilities theory. This paper will discuss how mobility regulations and urban projects involve public space interventions and the shaping of citizens’ (mobile) daily life activities and conditions. The phenomenon is illustrated through two cases: 1) The city’s latest mobility regulations (2014 and 2015) related to its inhabitants’ daily long-distance commuting and air pollution mitigation, and 2) the urban project called Cultural Corridor ‘Chapultepec/Zona Rosa’ (CCC) related to citizens’ urban planning interventions, which was cancelled in 2015. In order to achieve equality between territories, governments should consider citizens’ participation within urban projects and mobility regulations. Governments should also take account of interrelations between urban planning and mobility perspectives.

Le seul, le vrai, le paradis: Cultural mobility and French musical films (1930–50)

Maurice Chevalier, Juliette Gréco, Yves Montand, Édith Piaf, Charles Trenet – all these names refer to the close connection between French chanson and French cinema of the first half of the twentieth century. This article examines two dimensions of cultural mobility that align through a differentiated understanding of the artistic liaison between the popular music genre of French chanson and French musical films during the first decades of cinematic sound. First, the significant role and excessive use of the chanson will be examined along the parameters of cultural integration, distribution and transfer, all of which are inseparably linked to questions of cultural and social identity in the French musical of the 1930s and 1940s. Second, the formation, establishment and impact of the singer–actor as a professional field within the cinematic sphere will be discussed from the perspectives of mobility and migration. The methodologically areal term ‘space’ will be enhanced by notions of social and cultural mobility recently brought forth by the cultural disciplines. This article helps to decipher aspects of cultural mobility in French musical films and sheds light on the potential for the cinema in increasing music’s mobility.

The Spatial Mobility Trap? How Urban Contexts Shape the Spatial Mobility of Male Undocumented Youths

Some scholars have argued urban autonomy creates inclusive spaces for migrants, while others have argued interiorized border security and discriminatory policing constrain racialized migrants. This article examines the extent to which the urban context represents a spatial mobility trap for urban undocumented youths as they become adults, based on data from longitudinal comparative ethnography with undocumented youths, schools, and civil society actors in Paris and New York City. Public schools, public transportation, policing, and informal labor market practices distinguish the urban regimes of migrant il/legality in the two cities, shaping how such youths move within and outside urban space. These elements may magnify or mitigate legal‐status distinctions between undocumented youths and others. As protections for undocumented minors waned at adulthood, New York City's regime blurred legal‐status distinctions, accelerating intracity mobility for most youths while Paris's approach brightened such distinctions, limiting mobility. These findings contribute a spatial mobility perspective to studies of migrant illegality and an urban sociology perspective to the transition to adulthood.

Place attachment and mobility in the context of job‐induced multilocal dwelling—The case of China

AbstractThis study aims to understand the relationship between place attachment and mobility in a job‐induced multilocal dwelling context. Multilocal dwelling entails a long‐distance commute and having another residence in addition to the primary domestic one for job‐related purposes. From the mobility perspective, this study posits that a place should be understood as dynamic and relational, and place attachment as networked and flexible. Relying on interview data, this study identifies three distinct modes of relationship between place attachment and mobility—namely, disruption, compensation, and expansion. The findings reveal that under diverse modes, the characteristics of place attachment to different places of residence are distinct and determined by the interaction of mobility with materiality, social relations, and meaning construction in places. It sheds light on people‐place relationships in the context of job‐induced multilocal dwellings in China. Furthermore, it contributes to the understanding of the highly‐debated relationships between place attachment and mobility.

Older adults' adaptations to life events: a mobility perspective

AbstractMobility research tends to focus on physical movement and experiences in later life; however, changes in older adult mobility over time remains underexplored. Furthermore, older adults typically experience many life events, some of which result from cognitive and physical decline, and many of which impact mobility. This article aims to explore how life events affect the mobility of older adults over time. We conducted in-depth interviews with 22 older adults aged 55 years and over from Lancashire, United Kingdom. Of these participants, eight lived with memory problems. The findings show that both anticipated and unexpected life events play a profound role in the participants' mobility over time. Retirement, long-term illness and age-related illness were examples of anticipated life events, while the death of a loved one and developing memory problems were examples of unexpected life events. In both cases, participants' made external adaptations, such as moving home, or internal adaptations, such as self-awareness. The findings also emphasise the layered nature of life events and adaptations playing a role in the participants' mobility. Additionally, life events such as developing memory problems showed a domino effect, triggering further life events and adaptations which impacted the participants' mobility. This article emphasises how transition periods can occur before or after a life event, showing that adaptations can be pre-emptive to a life event. Our article contributes to calls for internal adaptations to be fully incorporated into age-related policy and also for age-related policy to be more inclusive for older adults who experience memory problems and dementia.

Bicycle-Oriented Development: How the Dutch Railroad Shaped Urban Planning and Discovered Cyclists along the Way, 1960-1990

Scholars often describe the history of Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) from an exclusive urban development perspective (linear or finger cities) or from a limited mobility perspective (Public Transit). In these histories, walking is described as the yardstick for a station’s catchment area. Using primary sources, this article shows how between 1960 and 1990 the Dutch railroads played a forgotten but key and unique role in enriching the TOD concept in the densely populated Western Netherlands with the bicycle as a feeder mode. This created a spatial model of a belt with compact bicycle towns along railroad lines. In the process, the railroad reinforced by local and national policies since then helped create cycling-based rather than walking-based fifteen-minute cities that generated larger catchment zones.

Commentary: Engage or disengage? Interpretations from a resource conservation perspective

In this commentary, I discuss the eight empirical contributions to the Motivation and Emotion special issue on goal disengagement from a resource conservation perspective. This process was not in the focus of the reported studies, but is central for understanding both engaging and disengaging. I will outline that many of the new findings on disengagement reported in this special issue are highly compatible with the predictions of and research on motivational intensity theory. Examples are the roles of commitment, subjective goal value, affective experiences, autonomy, self-awareness, and action planning. These variables have been found to be central for both engagement and disengagement and their consideration in a resource mobilization perspective should contribute to a more complete understanding of “letting go”.

가구 및 주거환경특성에 따른 도시 내 주거이동거리 분석

The purpose of this study is to empirically analyze the impact of household and neighborhood characteristic on the distance of intra-urban mobility. For purpose of this study analysis is performed on residential mobility conducted in the city of Busan. Residential mobility is an important factor that relocates sociological and demographic capital, and it could sometimes lead to significant urban issues. A number of studies have focused on residential mobility, but most of them have concentrated on its relationship with household characteristic and they focus on how many people or households move. In other words a number of previous studies simply show who or where residential mobility occur frequently without the notion of characteristics of migration. So the approach provide limited, and often biased views. The spatial perspective of residential mobility is one of the key aspects, and distance of migration is important factor that represents spatial patterns. Therefore, this study analyzes the correlation between the distance of intra-urban mobility and a set of neighborhood and household characteristics in a hierarchical structure. From result of multi-level model and cross-classified multi-level model, it is found that neighborhood and household characteristics have different impact on distance of migration. These result present a meaningful information to a body of literature in residential mobility.

Ride-hail to ride rail: Learning to balance supply and demand in ride-hailing services with intermodal mobility options

Growing spatiotemporal imbalance in supply and demand in ride-hailing services has been arousing concern. A variety of measures in the perspective of ride-hailing services per se is studied. However, approaching the imbalance problem in the broader perspective of intermodal mobility, which integrates different modes of passenger transportation in a single trip and aims to overcome limitations of any unimodal mobility, remains to be explored. This paper aims to investigate the potential of introducing intermodal mobility options to balance ride-hailing services. We first identify the importance of the availability decision on intermodal mobility options. Then we formulate the availability decision problem as a Markov decision process (MDP). Due to its convoluted system dynamics and large state space, we cast the intractable MDP into a reinforcement learning (RL) problem to approximately learn the availability policy. To stabilize the learning processes, we model the intermodal ride-hailing services as a stochastic queueing network and tailor a family of state-of-the-art RL algorithms to iteratively evaluate and improve the availability policy. Lastly, we test this optimization framework in a large-scale intermodal mobility scenario calibrated with real-world trip data. Results show that the learned availability policy can significantly dissipate riders’ queue and improve the service rates towards more balanced supply and demand.

When smooth space becomes turbulent: The collapse of Hanjin Shipping and the immobilisation of ships, containers, goods and people

This paper applies a mobilities perspective to the collapse of Hanjin Shipping in 2017, then the seventh-largest shipping line in the world and the biggest bankruptcy in the 50-year history of container shipping. Drawing on the notion of smooth space from Deleuze and Guattari that has previously been applied to the maritime transport sector to represent its space-annihilating tendencies, the analysis sets this apparently smooth space in opposition to the turbulence of disordered and fragmented mobilities. The case analysis charts not just the antecedents of the collapse but the immediate aftermath, in which flows of ships, containers, goods and people were rendered immobile and unmoored. Turbulence, drifting, induced and unproductive mobilities are anathema to the just-in-time globalised logistics sector, and the case analysis reveals how hyper-mobile flows of finance acted to reimpose the smooth logistics surface after a brief period of immobility following the bankruptcy.

Zooming into mobility to understand cities: A review of mobility-driven urban studies

Emerging big datasets about human mobility provide new and powerful ways of studying cities and addressing various urban issues. However, human mobility has usually been defined narrowly in prior research that limits the understanding of its values for urban applications. The aim of this study is to reveal the complexity and multiplicity of human mobility concept for various urban application scenarios, and present a comprehensive review of mobility-driven urban studies through four re-conceptualized urban mobility perspectives. Using a systematic review approach, existing mobility-driven urban studies are classified based on whether they interpret urban mobility as spatial movements, a social phenomenon, an economic indicator or a policy tool. Then, the core values of knowledge about urban mobility for addressing contemporary urban challenges are analyzed, and the current trends and future directions of mobility-driven urban studies are also discussed. Moving forward, the application of urban mobility knowledge can be further advanced by the evolution of mobility concepts, the improvement of mobility data quality and the innovation of mobility analytical methods. This review can contribute to the understanding the state of the art of mobility-driven urban studies, and provide inspiration and guidelines for studies of this area in the future.

Individual success, collective failure?

Public dialogue about social mobility in many countries has recently been dominated by the myth of meritocracy and uses a neo-liberal vocabulary of aspiration, ambition, and choice, considering mobility as an individual project of self-advancement involving moving up in the social hierarchy (Lawler & Payne, 2018; Friedman & Laurison, 2020). Meritocracy suggests that whatever your social position at birth, society ought to offer enough opportunity and mobility for ‘talent’, when combined with ‘effort’, to ‘rise to the top’. This idea is one of the most prevalent social and cultural tropes of our time (Littler, 2017). In this discourse, social mobility is the new panacea for wider historic and social ills, and the answer to the increase in classed and racialised inequalities. This special issue aims to challenge this widespread public and political discourse by deploying the sociological perspectives of social mobility and asking how (upward but also downward) mobility works, how fluid our contemporary societies are, what mobility means for those experiencing it, and what the social implications are of ‘individual […] success at the cost of collective failure’ (Reay, 2018). As an educational sociologist and academic with a working-class background, Diane Reay (2013) argues that ‘[a]t the collective level, social mobility is no solution to either educational inequalities or wider social and economic injustices. But at the individual level it is also an inadequate solution, particularly for those of us whose social mobility was driven by a desire to “put things right” and “make things better” for the communities we came from and the people we left behind.’ (Reay, 2013, p. 674). The papers in this issue are testimony to the theoretical stance that upward social mobility cannot be seen as an individual project but needs to be understood and analysed in the wider context of social inequalities (among others, Lawler & Payne, 2018; Friedman & Laurison, 2020; Bukodi & Goldthorpe, 2019). The authors tackle the topic of social mobility from two perspectives. The first group of the research papers measure and analyse social mobility processes using the conventional occupation and education indexes and the not-so-conventional ‘soft’ variables of the intergenerational transmission of parental capital(s) on mobility outcomes. Beyond these mainstream mobility studies, the second group of articles consists of ‘marginal research’ (Lawler & Payne, 2018), or small-scale investigations that provide readers with insights into how upwardly and downwardly mobile people experience mobility when they have to travel through social spaces, leaving behind one class and adjusting to life in another.

The Impacts of In Situ Urbanization on Housing, Mobility and Employment of Local Residents in China

Rapid economic growth and infrastructure development force in situ urbanization in locations where people from rural areas gain urban residency without experiencing long-distance geographical relocation. However, the impacts of in situ urbanization on farmers’ and other residents’ well-being remains unclear, and there are some arguments about the idea that “urbanization of people lags behind urbanization of land” in China. Therefore, this study firstly finds a reasonable way to measure in situ urbanization: the transfer of rural-urban division codes. On this basis, by applying the PSM-DID method, we use national census data to explore the impacts of in situ urbanization on farmers from the perspective of housing, mobility and employment. The research results show that after the in situ urbanization, the possibility of farmers moving into non-self-built high-rising buildings increases, while the possibility of farmers leaving the county for employment decreases. Besides, the employment structure in the county where in situ urbanization takes place has shifted from primary industry to secondary and tertiary industry. Moreover, this paper also discusses the spillover effects of in situ urbanization on other residents in the county. Our study shows that in situ urbanization can improve residents’ well-being and offers sustainable land-people integrated urbanization.

Vibrational frequencies and modes of a kinked inflatable beam

Inflated beams are under increasing application in various structures. Many inflatable structures have kinks during use due to folding or initial material defects. A specific emphasis is often placed on determining the static characteristics of inflated beams in bending and wrinkling. From the perspective of mobility, a kink is needed to realize the movement of the structure, namely the vibration-containing kink. There is a lack of knowledge in dynamic conditions, especially for simple and accurate solutions for kinked inflatable beams. This paper studies the vibrational frequencies and modes of kinked inflatable beams and deals with the theoretical analysis of the natural frequencies of kinked inflatable beams. The first-order natural frequency of the kinked inflatable beam is predicted by introducing the kink parameters, and the inflated pressure into the vibration equation of the beam. The predictions on the natural frequency agree well with the vibration test. Results reveal that the kink decreases the first-order natural frequency of the inflated beam greatly, and the beam has no global vibration mode but only a higher mode. The present results can provide meaningful guidance for innovative inflated structure design.

Understanding differences in rural tourism recovery: a critical study from the mobility perspective

This study analyzes the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on rural tourism and the subsequent recovery process from the perspective of mobility. The results show that the pandemic has exacerbated the time–space restrictions on tourist mobility, and the recovery process of different types of rural tourist destinations differs. Although tourist numbers in some rural areas have increased, the rural tourism market has not fully recovered and is struggling to grow significantly after the pandemic; thus, local governments and managers need to adopt prudent and diverse governance policies. The study criticizes the current research and holds that over-optimistic feelings have covered up the dilemma of rural tourism, violated the rights of vulnerable rural groups to have their voices heard, and may further exacerbate the uneven development of rural tourism. This study provides new insights that have important implications for future research on rural tourism.