Time Geography Research Articles

Urban geography in crisis times: insights from a feminist project

Urban geography in crisis times: insights from a feminist project

Scaling up time–geographic computation for movement interaction analysis

AbstractUnderstanding interactions through movement provides critical insights into urban dynamic, social networks, and wildlife behaviors. With widespread tracking of humans, vehicles, and animals, there is an abundance of large and high‐resolution movement data sets. However, there is a gap in efficient GIS tools for analyzing and contextualizing movement patterns using large movement datasets. In particular, tracing space–time interactions among a group of moving individuals is a computationally demanding task, which would uncover insights into collective behaviors across systems. This article develops a Spark‐based geo‐computational framework through the integration of Esri's ArcGIS GeoAnalytics Engine and Python to optimize the computation of time geography for scaling up movement interaction analysis. The computational framework is then tested using a case study on migratory turkey vultures with over 2 million GPS tracking points across 20 years. The outcomes indicate a drastic reduction in interaction detection time from 14 days to 6 hours, demonstrating a remarkable increase in computational efficiency. This work contributes to advancing GIS computational capabilities in movement analysis, highlighting the potential of GeoAnalytics Engine in processing large spatiotemporal datasets.

What can location-based social media reveal on human migration patterns in Europe?

ABSTRACT Numerous visualisation methods have been proposed, including Origin-Destination maps to represent movement patterns gathered from social media; however, visual clutter remains a persistent issue due to complex data dimensionality. Besides, most Origin-Destination maps fail to illustrate the temporal dimension of social network phenomena within the geographical environment. To tackle this issue, we propose the visualisation method for geo-located Facebook social-media data while emphasising the time aspect. Based on the citizen-generated data for the European Union (EU), we estimated the EU citizens’ residing or travelling across the EU member states as a means of current and previous destinations to reveal the extent of the hypothetical human migration. The proposed methodology consists of Origin-Destination maps implemented within the time geography framework as a model to support the process of analysis for decision-making. The generated visualisation allows comprehension of the scale of human movement distribution internally within the EU from a space–time perspective.

Phygital time geography, or: what about technology in tourists’ space-time behaviour?

The paper argues for the renewed relevance of time geography in tourism in light of the use of mobile technologies and ubiquitous connectivity. The paper proposes the concept of phygitality to understand how digital technologies are used in physical space, and how the interaction between the physical and the digital reconfigures tourists’ projects, paths, bundles, and constraints. The theoretical contribution builds on fifteen semi-structured interviews. The analysis shows that capability, coupling, and authority constraints are altered and mediated by digital devices. In the phygital time-space, tourists orient themselves in physical spaces, influenced by digital information; they create phygital paths and move between stations that result from the overlaying of digital information onto the physical space. Tourists’ goal-oriented mobility results in phygital projects, where logics of efficiency and optimization reduce the liminality of the tourist experience. Tourists’ bundles are created within and outside the physical vacation prism through digital communication.

Analyzing tiger interaction and home range shifts using a time-geographic approach

BackgroundInteraction through movement can be used as a marker to understand and model interspecific and intraspecific species dynamics, and the collective behavior of animals sharing the same space. This research leverages the time-geography framework, commonly used in human movement research, to explore the dynamic patterns of interaction between Indochinese tigers (Panthera tigris corbeti) in the western forest complex (WEFCOM) in Thailand.MethodsWe propose and assess ORTEGA, a time-geographic interaction analysis method, to trace spatio-temporal interactions patterns and home range shifts among tigers. Using unique GPS tracking data of tigers in WEFCOM collected over multiple years, concurrent and delayed interaction patterns of tigers are investigated. The outcomes are compared for intraspecific tiger interaction across different genders, relationships, and life stages. Additionally, the performance of ORTEGA is compared to a commonly used proximity-based approach.ResultsAmong the 67 tracked tigers, 42 show concurrent interactions at shared boundaries. Further investigation of five tigers with overlapping home ranges (two adult females, a male, and two young male tigers) suggests that the mother tiger and her two young mostly stay together before their dispersal but interact less post-dispersal. The male tiger increases encounters with the mother tiger while her young shift their home ranges. On another timeline, the neighbor female tiger mostly avoids the mother tiger. Through these home range dynamics and interaction patterns, we identify four types of interaction among these tigers: following, encounter, latency, and avoidance. Compared to the proximity-based approach, ORTEGA demonstrates better detects concurrent mother–young interactions during pre-dispersal, while the proximity-based approach misses many interactions among the dyads. With larger spatial buffers and temporal windows, the proximity-based approach detects more encounters but may overestimate the duration of interaction.ConclusionsThis research demonstrates the applicability and merits of ORTEGA as a time-geographic based approach to animal movement interaction analysis. We show time geography can develop valuable, data-driven insights about animal behavior and interactions. ORTEGA effectively traces frequent encounters and temporally delayed interactions between animals, without relying on specific spatial and temporal buffers. Future research should integrate contextual and behavioral information to better identify and characterize the nature of species interaction.

On that demon time: Black time geographies of reimagining, recovering, and resisting

This article introduces “Demon Time” as a theoretical concept for examining Black time geographies. Building off the theorization of demonic space, I theorize that demon time is an alternative Black temporality. I use the soundscapes of the Black church, the Black barber/beauty shop, and the strip club to think through demonic temporality as a mode of reimagination, a reimagining of Black subjectivities, a mode of recovery, an iterative process of recovery from anti-blackness, and a mode of resisting, a continual resistance of normative logics and western ideologies. These Black soundscapes produce Black timescapes which are anchored to time-spaces of Black cultural production. Thus, demon time offers us a way to reorient how we understand Blackness in moments of economic, social, and ecological crisis, while also allowing us to think about the incommensurability of Black temporalities across Black regions in the US.

Rhythmanalysis of Switzerland

Rhythmanalysis is a valuable analytical approach for charting daily rhythms, both for individuals and at the collective level, in order to feel the pulse of a territory and understand the way in which it is inhabited in terms of both space and time. Conceptually, the paper illustrates the importance of understanding the rhythms of territories in order to move beyond traditional spatial typologies, which focus mainly on functional and demographic aspects, by looking through the three-dimensional lens of time geography to focus on the potential behaviours in which individuals may engage in a given space at a given time, taking into account any constraints. The analyses reveal significant differences in different spaces in terms of rhythmic intensities and the types of activities practised. This spatio-temporal approach makes it possible to deploy a new reading grid of territorial differentiations and, more generally, to refocus on the issue of urbanisation and metropolisation, based on the rhythms of daily life of the residents. Such an approach facilitates an understanding of the urban phenomenon that goes beyond strictly functional aspects to focus on the way in which territories are inhabited both in space and in time.

Parenthood, spatial temporal environmental exposure, and leisure-time physical activity participation: Evidence from a micro-timescale retrospective longitudinal study

Parents with dependent children are at a high risk of physical inactivity. While previous studies have mostly focused on how parents' time constraints and changing social network may inhibit leisure time physical activity (LTPA) over the long-term, less is known about the integrated effects of parenting and spatial-temporal environmental exposure on the execution of LTPA during certain episodes of a day. By adopting an integrated social-spatiotemporal-environmental model (ST-ISEM) based on micro-timescale retrospective longitudinal analysis, we examine the association between LTPA participation and spatial-temporal environmental exposure at a micro-timescale, i.e., at the episode-level in working adults' workday, and specifically how parenting integrated with spatial-temporal environmental exposure can jointly influence episode-level LTPA participation. Using data from the day reconstruction method from 701 individuals in Shenzhen, China, we find that parenting may affect the participation of LTPA on workdays not only by shaping temporal environmental factors (time constraint path and social network path), but also by interacting with built environmental exposures (spatial path), both at the episode-level. This study contributes to the theorizing of an integrated social-environmental model for health and wellbeing by extending the ISEM from the life span to the micro-timescale and also by highlighting the importance of temporality in environmental exposure and health studies. It also contributes to the spatial temporal behavioral perspective of time geography literature by clarifying multiple pathways through which social and spatiotemporal environmental factors could interact and jointly affect health behaviors at a micro-timescale. This study contributes to the literature on parenting and LTPA decline by enriching and deepening the understanding of the time constraint and social network pathways through which parenting leads to LTPA change at the micro-timescale. While time constraints may decrease parents’ LTPA at long-term, increasing physical activities related to childcare after work may strongly obstruct moderate-to-vigorous LTPA at a micro-timescale. This study also identifies a spatial pathway by which parenting hinders LTPA due to changing understanding and usage of urban spaces. This pathway warrants attention from social epidemiologists, health geographers, and urban planners since existing interventions promoting physical activity in urban spaces may be ineffective for parents.

Space–time prism and accessibility incorporating monetary budget and mobility-as-a-service

Recent years in time geography have witnessed a flourishment of space–time prism (STP) modeling extensions for enhancing realism. However, there is little research on the incorporation of monetary budget in STP models to capture personal potential mobility space more realistically. This study considers both time and monetary budget constraints in STP modeling in a multimodal supernetwork integrating mobility-as-a-service and trip chains. We develop an efficient two-stage bi-criterion bidirectional search method to identify Pareto path sets to construct the resulting STP for conducting a flexible activity between two anchor nodes. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model and solution method, a case study with varying scenarios is conducted to evaluate the impacts of monetary budget on space–time accessibility and equality. The findings show that the ignorance of monetary budget overestimates accessibility and that MaaS, if not well designed, may not improve equality in accessibility as intended.

Coupling constraints affecting daily mobilities of Swedish families with wheelchair-using children

ABSTRACT Mobility can involve many barriers that make it challenging for individuals with disabilities to travel. When it is a child who has a disability, the whole family’s mobility practices can be affected by those barriers since families’ mobilities are often intertwined. This paper is based on time-use diaries and interviews with parents of wheelchair-using children living in Sweden. A time-geographical framework is used in the paper, especially focusing on the concept of coupling constraints, which can emerge when individuals need to be together to perform an activity, such as mobility. The main focus is on how coupling constraints between parents and the disabled child affect mobilities, but the findings show that couplings also exist with authorities and things and these can increase coupling constraints within the family. However, if being eligible for personal assistance and special transport service the coupling constraints within the family can decrease, indicating that such support systems are fundamental for these families’ mobilities. This paper also shows that time geography can be useful for disability studies and add new dimensions to the relational perspective on disability.

Telework after confinement: Interrogating the spatiotemporalities of home-based work life

During the pandemic, office workers were abruptly pushed into a home-based work life, as working from home became mandatory, full time, and digitally coordinated. The transition revealed an untapped potential of telework to reorganize daily life and facilitate resource-efficient adaptations. This study investigates the adjustments that took place, how daily life and mobility was remade in time and space, how change was experienced, and whether new preferences and habits were established. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 28 office workers, we examine whether and why the confined work-from-home pattern will have lasting influences on how and where people choose to live, work, relocate, and travel. Theoretically, we view the mandated working from home as a work-life shock event, causing a disruptive, novel, and critical experience of adaptation. We employ time geography to enhance a spatiotemporal understanding of shock events, i.e., how daily life and the local order of home are rearranged under new constraints. Our findings indicate a remarkable shift in the willingness to continue the home-based work life, essentially caused by valued experiences of heavily reduced travel time, a sense of always being ‘in place’, and a calmer pace of life. Felt spatial, digital, and emotional crowding at home challenge the new order, and residential relocation as a strategy to sustain a home-based work life is frequently mentioned. Although working from home is perceived as mostly efficient, the loss of informal social contact is driving a partial return to the office.

Identifying tourism attractiveness based on intra-destination tourist behaviour: evidence from Wi-Fi data

ABSTRACT Knowledge of tourism attractiveness is crucial for tourists to choose preferred destinations and helps tourism managers configure attractive resources to better meet tourist demands. However, small-scale (e.g. intra-destination) studies of tourism attractiveness are scarce, despite their unique significance in understanding tourist demand at the destination level. Based on time geography theory, this study proposes a new method called the stay-time-based tourism attractiveness index (STTAI), which can be used to identify tourism attractiveness within a destination using Wi-Fi data. Specifically, we tracked Wi-Fi probe requests from 670,000 travellers over a month in the Shichahai scenic area, a famous cultural tourism destination in Beijing. After segmenting tourists from the Wi-Fi data, we employed the STTAI to identify locations with frequent and extended tourist stays as activity stations with high tourism attractiveness. Further, this study examined the environmental impact on identified tourism attractiveness using regression analysis.

TÜRK-İNGİLİZ İLİŞKİLERİNE DENİZDEN BAKIŞ: KOCATEPE MUHRİBİNİN İNGİLTERE KRALI VI.GEORGE’UN TAÇ GİYME TÖRENİNE KATILMASI

In the Republic period, the Turkish navy became a dominant position in the geography in a short time and was used as a strategically supporting element of Turkish foreign policy from time to time. In this article, the subject of the Kocatepe destroyer's participation in the naval parade in England, which took place at the coronation of King George VI of England and attended by warships, was examined. Article; The technical characteristics and history of the Kocatepe destroyer, the decision to participate in the coronation ceremony of the destroyer, preparations before the cruise, the arrival of the destroyer Kocatepe in England, what happened in the port period in England, the parade at sea in honor of the king's coronation, the departure of the destroyer Kocatepe from England, and the process of returning to Turkey were tried to be included in the academic literature from a scientific point of view.

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.

Using a Cost-Distance Time-Geographic Approach to Identify Red Deer Habitat Use in Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada

Animal movements are realizations of complex spatiotemporal processes. Central to these processes are the varied environmental contexts in which animals move, which fundamentally impact the movement trajectories of individuals at fine spatial and temporal scales. An emerging perspective in time geography is the direct examination of the influence that varying contexts may have on observed movements. An approach that considers environmental context can yield actionable information for wildlife management, planning, and conservation; for instance, identifying areas of probable occupancy by an animal may improve the efficiency of fieldwork. This research develops the first known practical application of a new cost-distance-based, probabilistic voxel space–time prism (CDBPSTP) in efforts to more realistically characterize the unobserved habitat occupancies of animals occurring between known positions provided by location-aware technologies. The CDBPSTP method is applied to trajectory data collected for a group of red deer (Cervus elaphus) tracked near Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada. As a demonstration of the added value from examining how context influences movement, CDBPSTP habitat occupancy results are compared to the earlier PSTP method in context with empirical and theoretical understandings of red deer habitat preference and space-use behaviors. This comparison reveals that with CDBPSTP, variation present in the mover’s environment is explicitly considered as an influence on the mover’s probable path and occupancies between observations of its location. With the increasing availability of high-resolution geolocational and associated environmental data, this study highlights the potential for CDBPSTP to be leveraged as a broadly applicable tool in animal movement analysis.

Trajectory optimization for autonomous modular vehicle or platooned autonomous vehicle split operations

Autonomous modular vehicle (AMV) technology allows for the flexible adjustment of vehicle length en-route per application needs, e.g., docking multiple short vehicles into one long vehicle or, conversely, splitting a long vehicle into multiple shorter ones. AMV docking is an extreme case of autonomous vehicle (AV) platooning in that AMVs are physically connected with zero gaps. This paper studies the trajectory planning for platoon split operations. A two-stage optimization problem is proposed to design AMV or platooned AV split operations trajectories. The first-stage objective minimizes the split operation time duration for operation efficiency. The second-stage objective minimizes the sum of squared acceleration to identify the smoothest trajectories for riding comfort and fuel efficiency.A feasible cone method is proposed by extending the time geography to reveal theoretical properties on the solution feasibility and analytically solve the first-stage problem. An exact solution approach based on quadratic programming and a heuristic solution approach based on Pontryagin's maximum principle are proposed to solve the second-stage problem. The original feasible region of the second-stage problem is greatly reduced through the feasible region analyses.Numerical experiments show that the heuristic solution approach can always solve the second-stage problem instantaneously without any or with a slight loss of the operation optimality to satisfy real-time applications needs, whereas the exact solution approach with a state-of-the-art solver may take a much longer solution time that may impose challenges to certain real-time applications. It is also noted that the exact solution time is significantly reduced after accommodating the reduced feasible region. This is critical for applications requiring absolute optimality when the heuristic solution approach fails to reach the exact optimum. The comparison between the heuristic solution approach and a customized benchmark approach reveals the superiority of the heuristic solution approach in optimizing vehicle split trajectories. Results from sensitivity analyses on key parameters provide managerial insights into engineering implementations. The generalizability of the heuristic solution approach in solving another trajectory smoothing objective function considering both acceleration and jerk is proven by extensive numerical experiments. The generalizability of the heuristic solution approach in large-scale applications and when considering surrounding traffic is also discussed.

Torsten Hägerstrand and Christiaan van Paassen's Neighbourly Path, Project and Diorama

AbstractThis paper examines the influence of Christiaan van Paassen's (1917–1996) thinking on the development of time geography. It does so by examining van Paassen's and Torsten Hägerstrand's intertwined lives and friendship through a time‐geographic lens. By understanding their neighbourly path through time–space, their shared project to develop a modern geographical discipline becomes visible. Their shared diorama refers to van Paassen's insistence, adopted by Hägerstrand, that such a project would need to be premised on existentialist principles that accommodate meaning‐making and context.

“Diorama, Path and Project” to Understanding Everyday Life and Urban Space in Transitional Chinese Cities

Abstract”Diorama, path and project” by Torsten Hägerstrand is one of the most important contributions to the development of time geography. It introduced the diorama approach along the lines of “the live corporeality of humans and society”, and it still enduringly inspires the study of everyday life and urban space in a space–time integrative framework. This article revisits the classic article and reflects on certain key ideas, such as the “thereness” of diorama and the continuity and corporeality of project realization. Specifically, we will stress the applicability and the usefulness of the diorama approach to understanding everyday life and urban space in transitional Chinese cities. Finally, we discuss the enduring power, some methodological issues, as well as research agendas on urban geography and planning research in Chinese cities based on the diorama approach in time geography.

Interurban mobility: Eurythmic relations among metropolitan cities monitored by mobile phone data

The main aim of this article is to identify and explain the spatio-temporal pattern of interurban mobility in Czechia. The research is based upon analysis of mobile phone location data. More precisely, the data set about more than 3 million mobile-phone stations from 2019 is analysed to investigate mobility patterns and spatiotemporal behaviour among Prague, Brno, and Ostrava, three major agglomerations of Czechia. To achieve the goal, the paper uses proven concepts from time geography and chronogeography, such as constraints and pacemakers. The results reveal that, firstly, Prague's dominant position in the settlement hierarchy is crucial to mobility rhythms even for long-distance journeys. Secondly, journey purpose and means of transport are also proven to be key pacemakers in intraurban mobility.

Construction and Analysis of Space–Time Paths for Moving Polygon Objects Based on Time Geography: A Case Study of Crime Events in the City of London

Time geography considers that the motion of moving objects can be expressed using space–time paths. The existing time geography methods construct space-time paths using discrete trajectory points of a moving point object to characterize its motion patterns. However, these methods are not suitable for moving polygon objects distributed by point sets. In this study, we took a type of crime event as the moving object and extracted its representative point at each moment, using the median center to downscale the polygon objects distributed by the point sets into point objects with timestamps. On this basis, space–time paths were generated by connecting the representative points at adjacent moments to extend the application scope of space–time paths, representing the motion feature from point objects to polygon objects. For the case of the City of London, we constructed a space–time path containing 13 nodes for each crime type (n = 14). Then, each edge of the space–time paths was considered as a monthly vector, which was analyzed statistically from two dimensions of direction and norm, respectively. The results showed that crime events mainly shifted to the east and west, and crime displacement was the greatest in April. Therefore, space–time paths as proposed in this study can characterize spatiotemporal trends of polygon objects (e.g., crime events) distributed by point sets, and police can achieve improved success by implementing targeted crime prevention measures according to the spatiotemporal characteristics of different crime types.