Gender and Individual Access to Urban Opportunities: A Study Using Space–Time Measures

Abstract

Conventional accessibility measures based on the notion of locational proximity ignore the role of complex travel behavior and space-time constraints in determining individual accessibility. As these factors are especially significant in women's everyday lives, all conventional accessibility measures suffer from an inherent "gender bias." This study conceptualizes individual accessibility as space-time feasibility and provides formulations of accessibility measures based on the space-time prism construct. Using a subsample of European Americans from a travel diary data set collected in Franklin County, Ohio, space-time accessibility measures are implemented with a network-based GIS method. Results of the study indicate that women have lower levels of individual access to urban opportunities when compared to men, although there is no difference in the types of opportunities and areas they can reach given their space-time constraints. Further, individual accessibility has no relationship with the length of the commute trip, suggesting that the journey to work may not be an appropriate measure of job access. This paper investigates the determinants of spatial knowledge and how our knowledge of space varies according to geographic location. By using data on U.S. city names recalled at 22 test locations, a multivariate model of the information surface specific to each test location is calibrated. This model links the probability of a city being recalled from memory to its distance from the test site, its population size, its location with respect to other cities, and whether or not it is a state capital. The paper then suggests that these recall data provide information on spatial knowledge surfaces from which large-scale spatial choices, such as migration destinations, are made. Results from the analysis lend further evidence to the idea that spatial knowledge is stored and processed hierarchically and that individuals underrepresent information in large clusters. Consequently, the results have important implications for modeling any spatial behavior based on individuals' spatial information surfaces. In particular, the results cast further doubt on the validity of traditional large-scale spatial choice frameworks and lend support to the competing destinations hypothesis.

Gender and mobility: new approaches for informing sustainability

“…For many geographers and planners, the empowering aspect of mobility is straightforward; it comes from seeing mobility as a means of access to opportunity, enabling people to get to the places, the destinations (schools, jobs, hospitals, stores, parks) where they want or need to go (e.g., Hanson and Hanson 1980;Kwan 1999). Jennifer Mandel's (2004) study of women traders in Benin provides clear evidence of the empowering benefits of mobility; she found a strong relationship between women's physical mobility (ability to travel to wholesalers in specific other places and to access distant social networks) and livelihood: Women traders who were able to travel about had higher incomes.…”

“…In the US context, examples of the former are the National Personal Travel Survey (which does have data on travel for all purposes, not only the work trip), the American Time Use Survey, and the American Housing Survey; all of these data sets are for national samples and are very sketchy on variables measuring the geographic context of sample individuals. 6 In some cases travel diary data for a metropolitan area are accompanied by detailed spatial data bases describing the nature of the urban environment at a fine spatial scale; the Uppsala Household Travel Survey, collected in 1971 in the days before GIS, was the first to include detailed data on the urban environment (e.g., Hanson and Hanson 1980;Hanson 1982), but the current availability of urban GIS has made including such data as a part of travelactivity studies increasingly feasible (Kwan 2004). Regardless of the data source, however, gender enters analyses in this strand of the literature usually, though not always, as a binary male/female variable in a data matrix, whereas mobility is carefully measured along multiple dimensions (for example, distance and time traveled, mode of travel, linkages among trips, reasons for travel).…”

What Curriculum for Mobility and Transport Studies? A Critical Exploration

“…Authors have brought together several of these (and other) dimensions in their research (e.g. Kwan, 1999;Schwanen et al, 2004). In sociology, MTS is increasingly gaining recognition as shown by the rise of the journal Mobilities.…”

Considering daily mobility for a more comprehensive understanding of contextual effects on social inequalities in health: A conceptual proposal

“…Attributes which define an individual's social role (e.g. gender) (Kwan, 1999), social position (e.g. income or education) (Krivo et al, 2013, Kestens et al, 2010, Christian, 2012, Paez et al, 2010, or one's relation to others (e.g.…”