Theme Synopses

The importance of conceptualising time-space

Questions of temporality and spatiality are crucial to understanding key life-chance related life-course transitions such as childcare, school choice, work-family reconciliation, food choice and fitness, residential mobility and retirement, as well as to inter-generational exchange across and between life-courses. While these transitions constitute headline trends in public policy and planning debates, time and space are rarely considered as core constituents, beyond narrow proxies like time availability or duration, and spatial distribution or access. This tendency to under-theorise time (as clock-time) and its relationship to space as distance, is not confined to the policy arena. The application of time-space in life-course transition research has been hindered by two serious obstacles. First has been a poverty of data on the complex interacting dimensions of everyday routines, like the timing, spacing, duration and sequencing and associated experiential and affective dimensions (e.g. fear, isolation) of trips and activities which characterise specific life-course transitions or stages. The second has been a damaging methodological divide and lack of dialogue between quantitative, engineering and natural science models of interaction on the one hand, and social scientists concerned with the complexities of spatial behaviours, often reflected in intensive qualitative methods, on the other hand. Only now does it appear possible to overcome these obstacles; for example by exploiting new 3G mobile phone and GPS satellite navigation technologies; as well as through renewed interest, among North American feminist geographers in particular, to explore the potential of applying qualitative behavioural research findings to GIS. These developments reflect a broader trend in social sciences for methodological mixing and plurality to answer ever more complex social questions. It also reflects new possibilities for participatory research and user engagement to influence social policy and planning practice.

Exploring everyday co-ordination from cradle to grave

Advanced economies face many challenging and damaging social and environmental trends which impact on quality of life through key life-course transitions; for example child poverty, educational polarisation, unhealthy lifestyles, obesity, car dependency, transport poverty, poor physical fitness, atmospheric pollution and the like. Tackling these problems is especially complex when it is recognised that solutions do not reside in discrete ‘social’ ‘environmental’ ‘transport’ ‘health’ or ‘land use planning’ domains. A crucial and neglected common thread which runs through these issues is the co-constitutive relationship of time-space. Not only are questions of time-space conceptually important to life-chance related life-course transitions, but exploring this relationship also offers a constructive route by which social and natural scientists from quantitative and qualitative research backgrounds can work together, sharing knowledge and combining methods. Examples of the way that mixed methods and interdisciplinary collaboration expand research potential and capacity include current proposals (by core members); to harness advanced tracking technology to study pedestrian behaviour in relation to food & activity diaries to determine the many intersecting temporal (convenience) and spatial (landscape) factors underpinning a rise in childhood obesity; to employ geo-visualisation in qualitative research to trace informal support networks as a new perspective on households caring for persons with dementia. The seminar series will explore many more and diverse ways of thinking about temporality, spatiality and time-space co-ordination and bring this theorising to bear on issues which are emerging within everyday life. This is an ambitious and timely project.

Mixing methods and disciplines

The conjunction of issues at the intersection of spatiality and temporality provides a meeting place for different disciplines: geography, sociology, history, environmental and health sciences. Consequently our proposal provides an unprecedented opportunity to explore and develop the potential for theoretical and methodological innovation at this critical node of concern.

The proposed seminar series begins from an understanding that social inequalities and spatial segregation reflect the way people’s experience of space and place are shaped by their experience, physical capability and the environment, thus variations in the passage of time and pace of life vary between population groups and places. Urry (2006) notes, for instance, the way that ‘automobility’ creates the perception of ‘instantaneous’ time for some (those who can afford and are able by law and health to drive their own car) while at the same time endangering and imposing dependency on others (notably children). By comparing ‘instantaneous’ with clock-time, as well as noting popular identification with time ‘famine’, ‘squeeze’ and accelerated use (Robinson and Godbey 199: Jarvis 2005) time is recognised as a socially significant and qualitatively discrete measure of unequal life-chance, much like income or housing. Accounting for psychological as well as social, physical and logistical time-space capabilities, and for the historical development of specific temporal arrangements in society, calls for a more integrated and materially embedded theory and method of everyday co-ordination.

Tracing the literature forwards from Yi-Fu Tuan’s humanistic studies of spatial diffusion in the 1960s and the seminal work of Torsten Hagerstrand’s ‘time-geography’ and Lund School ‘choreography of existence’ in the 1960s, to the cutting edge feminist 3D qualitatively informed GIS of the likes of Mei-Po Kwan (1999; 2000: 2002) and Marianna Pavlovskaya (2002; 2005), four foundational properties emerge as the raw material of significant transformation. The four properties are: time-space; life-chance; lifestyle and life-course transition. These will provide the frame of reference within which to tackle this conceptually ambitious and methodologically innovative agenda.

Arguably some of the most exciting prospects for tackling spatial and temporal complexity involve multiple methods, such as the combination of household biographies, diaries (including web-cam observations) with geographic information systems (GIS) to build up a detailed time-space landscape of household activities, resources and movements (see for instance Kwan 1999; Pavlovskaya 2004; Laurier 2001). The seminar series explicitly builds on the reported benefits of doing qualitative research for the purpose of integrating with existing (or adapted) geographical information systems, especially as a route to critically informed policy evaluation (Pain et al. 2006). These multiple methods, including new uses of existing time-use data, raise many familiar but also new ethical questions which the series will seek to engage with. Alongside the potential data benefits of advanced tracking and surveillance technologies the series will explore the dangers and potential misuse of these technologies. The series has dual concern for social justice and environmental sustainability and will through its interdisciplinary agenda avoid the sacrifice of one for the other.