Advanced urban geography
18-9: Lecture 0: positioning and instruction
Trends:
- From a place-based towards a person-based society (mobility patterns/networks)
- Increased physical and virtual mobility
- the world becomes an infinite collection of possibilities: a container filled to the brim with a
countless multitude of opportunities yet to be chased or already missed. There are more
opportunities than any individual life, however long, adventurous and industrious can attempt to
explore, let alone to adopt (Bauman, 2000).
Movement, activities and interactions
- Activity fragmentation
- The weakened association between activity, time and place that ICTs made possible facilitate the
disintegration of activities into smaller subtasks, which can then be performed at different times and
at different locations (Alexander et al. 2011).
Spaces and spheres
- Multiplex city
- The idea of the urban as the co-presence of multiple spaces, multiple times and multiple webs of
relations, tying local sites, subjects and fragments into globalizing networks of economic, social and
cultural change.
Concepts, theories and research
- Connections and flows through cities
- Doreen Massey has argued that places are actively constituted by mobility – particularly the
movement of people but also commodities and ideas. Places to Massey are not clearly bounded,
rooted in place, or connected to single homogenous identities but produced through connections to
the rest of the world and therefore are more about routes than roots (Cresswell, 2009).
- Spaces are open and dynamic places
Post structuralism
- Contextual / situational and open
- Meaning and action must be set in a context of extensive relations. Meanings and actions cannot be
seen as simply manifestations of underlying structures. They proliferate in complex and unexpected
ways, depending on the relations established between subjects and objects (Murdoch, 2006).
Lecture 1: Time geography and the mobilities turn: contextual and situational
approaches
- Daily life perspective > daily space time paths
- Spatio-temporal context > city, infrastructures and places
- Outcomes > Inclusion? Health? Well-being? Safety? Resilience?
- Transitions > societal, economic, technological
18-9: Lecture 0: positioning and instruction
Trends:
- From a place-based towards a person-based society (mobility patterns/networks)
- Increased physical and virtual mobility
- the world becomes an infinite collection of possibilities: a container filled to the brim with a
countless multitude of opportunities yet to be chased or already missed. There are more
opportunities than any individual life, however long, adventurous and industrious can attempt to
explore, let alone to adopt (Bauman, 2000).
Movement, activities and interactions
- Activity fragmentation
- The weakened association between activity, time and place that ICTs made possible facilitate the
disintegration of activities into smaller subtasks, which can then be performed at different times and
at different locations (Alexander et al. 2011).
Spaces and spheres
- Multiplex city
- The idea of the urban as the co-presence of multiple spaces, multiple times and multiple webs of
relations, tying local sites, subjects and fragments into globalizing networks of economic, social and
cultural change.
Concepts, theories and research
- Connections and flows through cities
- Doreen Massey has argued that places are actively constituted by mobility – particularly the
movement of people but also commodities and ideas. Places to Massey are not clearly bounded,
rooted in place, or connected to single homogenous identities but produced through connections to
the rest of the world and therefore are more about routes than roots (Cresswell, 2009).
- Spaces are open and dynamic places
Post structuralism
- Contextual / situational and open
- Meaning and action must be set in a context of extensive relations. Meanings and actions cannot be
seen as simply manifestations of underlying structures. They proliferate in complex and unexpected
ways, depending on the relations established between subjects and objects (Murdoch, 2006).
Lecture 1: Time geography and the mobilities turn: contextual and situational
approaches
- Daily life perspective > daily space time paths
- Spatio-temporal context > city, infrastructures and places
- Outcomes > Inclusion? Health? Well-being? Safety? Resilience?
- Transitions > societal, economic, technological
