New paper on well-being

Last week a paper I co-authored with Donggen Wang at Hong Kong Baptist University has appeared in the Annals of American Geographers. In this paper we argue that the Day Reconstruction Method devised by Daniel Kahneman and colleagues can be usefully linked to time-geography. One benefit of doing this is that what Mei-Po Kwan calls the Uncertain Geographical Context Problem (UGCoP) — spatiotemporal uncertainty in the actual areas or places that exert influence on the behaviour and experiences of individuals — that has characterised past studies of the geographical context on individuals’ subjectively experienced well-being. Another benefit is that the effect of spending time together with others (family members or friends) on one’s subjectively experienced well-being can be measured and examined more precisely.

Using data from Hong Kong we found that the influence of the actual location where people spend time for daily activities other than paid work is very limited (at least as far as we were able to measure characteristics of that location); the effect of where individuals live on their overall life satisfaction was much stronger. Further work is therefore required to better measure and examine how the places where people spend time affects their subjective experience of well-being.

We did find that doing things together with others makes them happier than doing the same things alone, and it also appears that the relationship between the duration of a daily activity and people’s subjectively experienced well-being depends on with how they have undertaken that activity. One implication of this finding is that the relationships between social capital and subjectively experienced well-being cannot be examined or understood properly without due attention for individuals’ everyday life — i.e. their actual time-use and space-time path.

A limited number of free copies of the article is now available from here.

International time-geography days

A while has past since the last post, and a lot has happened. This includes not least the annual conference of the Association of American Geographers in Tampa (FL) in April during which Mei-Po Kwan and myself convened seven inspiring sessions on the ‘Geographies of Mobility’, in which geographers from many different hues — i.e. working from a wide range of theoretical and methodological perspectives and focusing on a vast array of topics — come together and learned about each other’s work.

More recently, 14-16 May, I attended the International Time-Geography Days at Linköping University, organised by Torsten Hägerstrand’s former student, professor Kajsa Ellegård, and her former student, Elin Wihlborg. They did a wonderful job in organising an excellent conference, and took us to the rural area around Åsby parish where Hägerstrand conducted the fieldwork for his PhD thesis (together with his wife). Nowadays Åsby is a peaceful — if ageing and still shrinking — community. It is quite hard to imagine now that this is the setting in which Hägerstrand began to develop his ideas about budget-space, Rum, and the competition between projects for space and time as scarce resources, all of which are at the heart of time-geography. Life in the Åsby area must have been much harsher some 50-60 years ago. Obviously, the fact that we as casual visitors — tourists almost — were visiting the area on a very sunny day must have formatted my perceptions as well.

Tucked away in boxes and on shelves in a back office somewhere in Linköping University can Hägerstrand’s books and notes be found. It was here that I made the following picture:

QuoteHagerstrand

 

 

 

 

 

 

In a way the quote from Goethe typed up by Hägerstrand sums up time-geography quite nicely: “Everything that comes into being searches for space and will last, thereby crowding out something else from its place and shortening its duration“. Competition for space and time — the essence of time-geography as envisaged by Hägerstrand in the 1970s — articulated at its best.

Critical Space-Time Geographies

Today a special issue I guest edited with Mei-Po Kwan for Environment and Planning A has been published. It comprises four substantive papers, a commentary by Mike Crang  and an editorial by Mei-Po and myself — all highlight the need for critical geography to consider both space and time in its analysis of social differentiations and processes. The substantive papers focus on the marginalisation of self and others (Valentine and Sadgrove), labour migration (Rogaly and Thieme), care (Bowlby) and the night-time economy (Schwanen et al.). All papers were presented during a paper session at the 2011 AAG Conference in Seattle.

The whole point of the special issue is to highlight the need for geographers to think and examine whether they are interested in in terms of spatiotemporality rather than spatiality. This point has of course been made oftentimes, among others by Torsten Hägerstrand, Henri Lefebvre, Nigel Thrift, Doreen Massey, and numerous others (including Mei-Po and myself) but there is no harm in repeating the message and in showing what considering space and time is capable of bringing to light in theoretically informed empirical research.

Mike Crang’s commentary and the editorial by Mei-Po and myself are available as open access documents and can be downloaded here and here.

Thoughts on today’s time-geography

The past few weeks have been hectic with the AAG conference during term time, among others. So I have not kept up as much with writing as I liked to, but the next set of posts will be about my activities and experiences during the AAG annual conference.

This first post will focus on my short presentation on today’s time-geography during a panel session organised by Shih-Lung Shaw and Dan Sui. My key point was that much time-geographic research is more driven by concerns about data and measurement than by (what I would consider) ‘prudent’ use of Haegerstrand’s full array of time-geographical concepts. To elaborate this argument I drew on the Aristotelian notion of phronesis as reintroduced in contemporary social-scientific thinking by Bent Flyvbjerg (and Hans-Georg Gadamer and other philosophers previously). The full text of my talk is available as a pdf file at this link:

Time geography panel session AAG 2012