Thinking Time Geography

Front matter

THINKING TIME GEOGRAPHY

CONCEPTS, METHODS AND APPLICATIONS

Thinking Time Geography

Index

141 151

Figures

2.1

2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5

2.6

3.8 3.9

3.10

4.1 4.2

4.3

4.4

The now is located at one point in time along the Time axis, and now is constantly moving upwards as time goes by Influence of birth year on life experience

Visualization of added and contextual time use

The basic dimensions in time-geographic visualizations Two different ideas about abandoned houses and emigration from Sweden

Time as point in time and time as process — fundamental differences

The construction of an individual path

Elementary events

A bundle with two individual paths

The principle of the prism

Formation of generational experiences from societal reforms Contextual time use at individual and aggregate levels

The Inner and Outer worlds of an individual from a time-geographic perspective

Experiences grounding intension for future prioritizing When the Inner world”s intensions collide with the conditions of the Outer world

The intersection between two organizational projects and one individual project

Developments in Swedish society over 140 years

Reforms that framed the development of the Swedish welfare society

An individual”s daily movements from home and back in a local settlement including visits to a post office, bank

office and workplace

Matching individuals in the population with activities, under constraints of organizations” timetables and

human needs for sleep and rest

14 15 17 19

20 21 29 32 34 35 37 38

40 42

5.1 5.2

6.1 6.2

6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6

6.7 6.8

6.9

7,1 7.2

7.3

7.4 7.5

7.6

7.7 7.8

Prisms shovving the basis of the principle of distance decay Two packing principles for use with time and space: temporal intensity and spatial density

Production and individual perspectives of vvork

The vvork task as the intersection betvveen production and individual, from macro to micro levels

VVorking on the assembly line

Working in the reflective production system

Milking activities in vveek, day and hour perspectives Inside the covvshed: 21 covvs vvait for milking. Resources for performing the activity

Resource use and milking activities

Time used by a dentist (service provider) and by patients (service consumers) for treatments during a time period Visualization of 756 teachers giving lectures, planning lectures and correcting assignments on Tuesdays

The headlines given in the time-geographic paper diary The hierarchical category scheme developed for the time-geographic diary method

Visualization of contexts generated from time-geographic diaries

Relating the contexts to each other

Finding the project context in the activity sequence of the everyday activity context

Illustration of the principle for creating a life chart, used in research on suicide attempts

Cooking and eating activities in a population Interventions in the lives of people with severe mental illness in the first 10 years after diagnosis vii

74 82

83 86 89 91

92 93

99 107

111 112

118 121

Tables

7.1 Perspectives on time 105 7.2a Highest-level activity categories in the time-geographic activity categorization scheme 110

7.2b The Hetus categorization scheme 110

Preface

This book is the result of many years of living with a time-geographic mindset. It was founded when I, as a human geography student, read the most intriguing and unique national investigation I had experienced until then. Written by Professor Torsten Hägerstrand, it demonstrates how to overcome the cleavage between macro-level aggregate averages and micro-level everyday life as lived by people. This was an eye-opener, and when I in the autumn of 1975 was asked to serve as a research assistant in a research project about the future public transportation systems in Scandinavian cities, led by Bo Lenntorp and Torsten Hägerstrand, I could not resist. I was involved in the time-geography research group in Lund University, which grounded me for my engagement in developing the time-geographic approach in the coming years in studies of a wide flora of empirical fields. The studies concern, for example, milking cows; the development of the dairy industry; production and work organization in the automobile industry; the integration of teachers? work tasks in their daily life activities; and energy use in households. I have also developed a time-geographic diary method where the activity sequence of the diarist is put in the context of places visited, persons encountered, appliances used and subjective experiences of the activities.

This book is my summary of the time-geographic approach, its development and ontological grounds, concepts, methods and notation system. From the PhD courses in time-geography that I have held over the years, and from the yearly seminars in the Scandinavian time-geography network of researchers, I have experienced the lack of a book which presents the approach as a whole. Here is my contribution to the research community interested in getting deeper into time-geography. I hope this book will inspire coming generations of researchers interested in developing new knowledge about how human activities in the time-space influence life in the environmental context.

When I went out to fetch the cows for milking in the summer afternoons in 1975, I could not imagine what influence this experience would have on what I have done in my life. Obviously, there were more opportunities in the future than I had in my mind. My individual path as a researcher can be traced back to the coupling between milking cows and the reading of Hágerstrand's 1972 work. I hope that young researchers reading this book will find possible couplings between the time-geographic thinking and their research interests.

x Preface

Last but not least, 1 vvant to say that the inestimable harsh and honest critique, combined vvith invaluable encouragement to go further in the vvork on and in time- geography, given by my colleague and friend Bo Lenntorp has strengthened my paving the time-geographic path. It has been a pleasure even to be criticizedl

13 May 2018 Kaisa Ellegard

Acknowledgements

The project that made this book possible is funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, in the RJ sabbatical program. Without that support the book would have remained an idea. The project made it possible for me to visit many scholars engaged in time-geographic research. I would especially like to thank my hosts at the universities visited; Professor Andrew S. Harvey, St. Mary”s University, Halifax, Canada, Professor William (Bill) Michelson, University of Toronto, Canada; Associate Professor Dana Anaby, McGill University, Montreal, Canada; Professor Yanwei Chai, Peking University, Beijing, China; Associate Professor Tim Schwanen, Oxford University, Oxford, England; Professor Masago Fujiwara, University of Shimane, Hamada, Japan; Professor Kohei Okamoto, Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan; Professor Martin Dijst, Utrecht University, the Netherlands, now at Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research, Luxembourg; Associate Professor Eva Magnus, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway; Professor Mei-Po Kwan, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA; Professor Harvey J. Miller, Ohio State University, Columbus, USA; and Professor Shih-Lung Shaw, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA. I also want to thank all of their colleagues for attending the seminars and lectures I gave, and for good discussions at all these places.

I want to thank three Swedish researchers for sharing their different experiences and perspectives on the spread of time-geography. On one hand, the human geographers Professor Bo Lenntorp and Associate Professor Solveig Mårtensson, who both were engaged in Hagerstrand”s research group from the 1960s, and, on the other hand, occupational therapist Ulla Kroksmark, who introduced time-geography to the occupational science community. As a member of the research group Technology, Everyday Life, Society (TEVS) at my department, Technology and Social Change, Linköping University, Sweden, I have had the privilege of presenting drafts of chapters of this book and the critical discussions have helped me to improve the ideas and the text.

My frankest critic, Bo Lenntorp, has read everything and pointed out my weaknesses and given support during this process — thank you for this and for our collaboration since the mid 1970s! In the end, the mistakes and misinterpretations that remain are solely my own.

Part I 1 Introduction — origin and societal context

Capturing societal change

On a journey from one big city to another in modern Sweden, the trip goes through rural areas displaying a great variation in the scenery, with forests, lakes, villages, farms, fields with crops and not many people. Here and there, at some distance from modern settlements, a desolate farmhouse appears, with a broken roof beam, windows and door fallen apart and a big tree growing too close to the wall; it resembles a still-life arrangement. However, such farmhouses enclose a lot of human activity. Once, people worked hard to construct and maintain them, and they must have been proud when the new house was completed and the family could establish a life there, subsequently sustaining themselves by working on the small farm. The modern traveler passing by gets a quick glimpse of the material remains of this life, but will probably not reflect over what is embedded in it. What once was an important resource for sustenance of a whole family is in the modern society of little worth, if any. What was a resource and a source of pride is turned into something to pity or not notice at all. The traveler also passes relics of small-scale factories, which were established in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, close to raw materials and water power. These too have met a similar destiny as the small farms, resulting in factory lay-offs and people moving into larger cities.

The desolate farmhouses and factory buildings indicate fundamental societal change over time, which gives rise to reflections about what is a resource, and what activities do people engage in over time at various geographical settlements. It underlines the importance of taking time and place into consideration when reflecting over and investigating human activity in current societies.

The time-geographic approach provides conceptual tools and a notation system useful for investigating processes of societal change. It helps in analyzing how one and the same need is satisfied differently depending on where, when and by whom the activities are performed. It has to do with variations in available resources, in terms of knowledge, technologies and tools, and the opportunities for people to arrange the resources so that they are within reach when needed to perform activities aimed at achieving goals and satisfying needs. The latter concerns couplings in time and space, which is a main issue for time-geography developed by human geographer Torsten Hägerstrand.

Successful performance of activities to achieve goals creates couplings in time and space between the involved persons on one hand, and these persons and the tools and other resources needed on the other. Then, the time-space location of people and resources is essential. When considering couplings in time and space the individual”s dependence on other individuals is underlined, which helps reveal what might hinder, or facilitate, the achievement of individual and organizational goals. The two seemingly simple dimensions of time and space help sort out things that otherwise might be perceived as entangled and not subject to a coherent logic."

The time-space couplings in different contexts

The daily activities in modern households are the results of coordination between the household members concerning engagement in different projects. Households are also dependent on the schedules and locations of workplaces, and the supply of services, schools and day care centers. Increasing geographic centralization of service supply makes people more dependent on transportation. This section shows how the organization of serving a meal in two types of societies puts very different claims on household members” time and coordination of their activities.

Fundamental long-term changes in societal conditions for production and consumption are revealed by a closer look at serving a meal in a household in an agricultural and an industrial society respectively. Generally, meals relate to the inevitable human need for food, include a basic relationship to nature for ingredients and relate to how possible couplings in time and space are arranged between people and various kinds of resources.

In an agricultural society, the serving of a meal in a household requires fundamentally different activities from household members compared to a household in an industrial society. It concerns different time perspectives as well as differences regarding the production means and organization, geographical location of production relative to consumption, organizations” specialization, size of production units, use of resources and handling of waste? and need for transportation, and what is relevant knowledge. An outcome is that the total time household members spend on serving a meal today is relatively limited compared to that of those in the agricultural society, and so is the length of the total time period within which the household members perform the necessary activities for it.

In today”s society, a household can get a meal in many ways, all based on production of ingredients in specialized organizations. They can use ingredients bought earlier or go to the grocery shop to buy what is needed, and they can go to a restaurant providing meals cooked by a professional chef. In this case, not only the production of the ingredients but also the serving of the meal is decoupled from the household members and put onto professionals.

In contrast, in an agricultural society, a meal in a farm household was the outcome of the combined work of household members engaged in the many different kinds of activities and projects at the farm during the whole year. They worked in the field, in the meadow, in the cowshed and stable and workshop. Household

Introduction — origin and societal context 5 members performed activities for producing food in a coordinated sequence over the year, which finally turned the combination of work efforts and materials into the ingredients necessary for cooking food. Then, to realize the meal in the agricultural society the farm household members had to master and coordinate activities related to a whole body of consistent knowledge, which today is regarded as fundamentally different kinds of knovvledge fields.? The vvhole and varied body of knovvledge mastered by the households in the agricultural society is today differentiated and replaced by industrial activities. Instead, different industries specialize in food production.

In the Scandinavian agricultural society, production and consumption activities vvere performed in close vicinity and the production vvas immediately dependent on the local climate, vveather, soil quality and the knovvledge among the household members and their work in the production. It took a long time to produce the ravv materials needed for serving a meal, and the agricultural households covered the whole process from seed to bread There were limited needs for long-distance transport of raw materials. This is what Hägerstrand called the vertically linked society (Hägerstrand 1970b); later he used the term short-distance society for it (Hagerstrand 1988).

The production of ravv materials and ingredients of a meal for the modern household, on the contrary, is decoupled from most of the activities performed by the household members, not only in a material sense but also as regards knowledge about the production. Thereby, the time spent by the modern household members on activities necessary for serving a meal is much shorter than in the agricultural society, and it is also less directly coupled to the local agricultural conditions.

Today, the ingredients of the meal lean heavily upon specialization and concentration of the food industry, where the production units and distribution systems are mainly organized according to large-scale production principles and economies of scale. Raw materials and semi-finished products for food production, then, are transported from different places in the world to food industries and further to grocery shops to be bought by members of households. Hágerstrand called a society with such a geographically spread location of activities and production units the horizontally linked society (Hágerstrand 1970b). Later on, he used the term long-distance society for this societal organization of production (Hägerstrand 1988). The many long-distance journeys are possible because of the relatively cheap supply of fuels, transportation methods with cooling equipment and a huge infrastructure for transportation. Specialization of food production meant decoupling it from households, which was a prerequisite for the development of the industrial society with its need for labor and for urbanization. Taken together, the processes have freed most people from the time-space couplings that bound them to the hard farming work activities, but instead they are dependent on food industries.

Of course, the horizontally linked society, just like the vertically linked society, depends on the local climate, weather and the fertility of the soil in the places where crops are grown and animals nourished. Thereby, the production of raw materials for food, at the very place where the crops are growing, is similar in the two types of societies, but the consequences differ. For example, in the vertically linked society extreme weather might lead to lack of food and starvation for the household, while in the modern society the urbanized customers might experience the extreme weather conditions solely via rising prices caused by decreased raw material supply.

Whether the society is mainly vertically or horizontally linked, the production of ingredients and the cooking of a meal requires coordination in time and space, both as regards people and material and immaterial resources. Time-geography provides tools for understanding such combinatory principles in time and space of relevance for production and consumption in the daily life of people in different kinds of societies.

Hägerstrand used the ongoing specialization and concentration in agricultural production to exemplify the long-term societal changes, from a vertically linked, short-distance society into a horizontally linked, long-distance society. Partly this emanates from his personal experience of the changing and rapidly urbanizing Sweden, with increasing mobility, specialization and geographical concentrations of industrial and service activities as well as people.

Torsten Hägerstrand: a short biography

Torsten Hägerstrand”s biography is interlaced with the long-term changes in Sweden that fundamentally transformed the society. From the late 19th century and during the 20th century, Sweden went from being a poor agricultural society dominated by a rural population and high emigration figures into a modern industrialized welfare society, with an urbanized population and high immigration, which will be dealt with in Chapter 4. At the societal level, these processes influenced the location and organization of activities in production, administration and services, resulting in specialization, concentration and large-scale organizations. At the individual and household level, the process gave rise to developments such as those exemplified in the section above. Sweden is currently a rich postindustrial country with high material living standards and a general social welfare system recognized worldwide.

Torsten Hägerstand, born in 1916, lived his early life in the small community Torps Bruk, located in the forested county of Småland in Southern Sweden. The region was dominated by small farms and small factories built close to raw materials and water-power sources. He experienced the different living conditions among his friends, whose fathers worked in various occupations in the small-scale production industries, agriculture and services.

Hägerstrand”s father was a schoolmaster and the family lived on the second floor of the schoolhouse. The schoolchildren”s presence and absence in the building and outside on the schoolyard made the young Hägerstrand reflect on variations in daily rhythms depending on day of the week and time of the day, which he commented upon in The Practice of Geography (1983). Hence, the location of his home in the schoolhouse made him experience the difference in activities and social encounters at the same place in different time perspectives.

Introduction — origin and societal context 7

His father, the schoolmaster, underlined the importance of studies to Hägerstrand from his early childhood. The school subject hembygdskunskap (home area studies) was introduced in the Swedish primary school system in the early 20th century and his father eagerly taught it, not just to the pupils in class but also to the children in the Hágerstrand family. The home area studies subject mixed knowledge from different scientific disciplines, i.e. biology, history, archaeology, geography and ethnography, and made it relevant for the pupils by setting it into the context of the local community. The schoolchildren”s own experiences of the nature and social life in their neighborhood was thereby related to general knowledge of the schoolbooks. In his teaching, the schoolmaster was inspired by the Swiss pedagogue Pestalozzi, who claimed that the schoolchildren should learn about the world from what is close to them and outwards. Hence, for example, the pupils learnt how to draw a map of their classroom, then the schoolyard, and after that larger areas were mapped, thereby emphasizing the importance of scaling the objects to be shown on a map (Hágerstrand 1983).

The co-existence of, and mutual interdependence and competition between, non-living things (material artifacts and things created by nature) and living entities in the schoolyard and its vicinity (a mix of flowers, trees, insects, human beings, wild and domesticated animals, and so on) fascinated the young Hägerstrand. This interest grounded him for thinking about what the co-existence of various kinds of species in a certain area meant for the living creatures as well as for the landscape. His interest was in finding out the conditions for the different phenomena and their existence in a context, rather than grouping species into fixed categories based on their similarity.

Hägerstrand entered Lund University as a student in the late 1930s, and early on he became puzzled by the dominating specialization in academia — which differed fundamentally from the knowledge development he experienced in school, based in the home area studies subject and the pedagogy of Pestalozzi. Later in life, as an established researcher he promoted the idea of transgressing the borders between scientific disciplines construed by humans.* After studies in several disciplines, among them ethnography, geography, archaeology and mathematics, he graduated and started his PhD studies in geography, a discipline that he found less specialized than most of the others. Initially his research concerned migration in a small Swedish parish during the 19th century and the emigration to America from there. The insights and conclusions from this study are presented in depth in Chapter 2. Thereafter, he studied diffusion of innovations in the same geographic area. The latter study resulted in Hagerstrand”s PhD thesis, defended in 1953. From the studies of migration and innovations, his interest was directed to individuals” continuous movements in both time (continuous sequences of events) and space (location and transportation of material/physical entities). This theorization on both migration chains and innovation waves laid the ground for developing the thinking that was eventually presented as the time-geographic approach. The general time-geographical approach, with its ontology, concepts and notation system, is presented in chapters 2 and 3.

Hägerstrand was appointed Professor in Human Geography in 1957, in a period when the Swedish society was rapidly changing and the urbanization movement was strong. There was a demand for academic knowledge to understand the process and to steer societal development. In the mid 20th century policy makers at local, regional and national levels, some of them Hägerstrand”s former students, engaged their former teacher as an expert and source of inspiration in their efforts to plan for the development of the welfare state. By then, there was a relatively small number of social science researchers in Sweden and many of them were engaged in constructing the welfare society.

This societal transformation, in combination with the conclusions from research on the importance of considering the time-space movements of individual phenomena, frames the development of time-geography. The societal transformation of Sweden and its influence on the development of time-geography is presented more in depth in Chapter 4.

Hägerstrand”s time-geography was in the making when he, together with a number of university professors in human geography and economics, got a big grant from the research foundation Riksbankens Jubileumsfond? for a joint social science research project, “The urbanization process”. For Hägerstrand this project meant that for the first time in his career he had an opportunity to form a research group, and three young researchers — two men, Bo Lenntorp and Tommy Carlstein, and one woman, Solveig Mårtensson — worked together with him in the Research Group for Process and System Analysis in Human Geography. The research group, informally called the time-geography research group, grew over the years. Hägerstrand was appointed to a personal professorship in 1971, financed by the Swedish Research Council for Humanities and Social Science. With the personal professorship, he had good opportunities to engage fully in the further development of the time-geographic approach, now with increasing emphasis on the ecological orientation of the approach (Lenntorp 2010). In parallel, the activities in the time-geography research group continued until Hägerstrand”s retirement in 1982. Some researchers in the group eventually had positions in universities in Sweden and went on with their time-geographically inspired research."

After a long period of work with the growing community of planners in the Swedish bureaucracy, Hägerstrand became increasingly disappointed over the lack of interest in practicing the concrete means and theoretical ideas that he presented and discussed at the meetings. In the mid 1970s he wrote:

it is very easy to dream up blue-prints for new undertakings but very hard to imagine their fate and their consequences for other legitimate processes when put into practice. Perhaps the trouble is that thought does not encounter in its own world the constraints of space and time.

(Hägerstrand 1976: 334)

In the quotation, the notion of time and space is underlined and the two are regarded as underestimated constraints for realizing ideas and plans. One main

Introduction — origin and societal context 9 conclusion is that the time and space dimensions should be put to the fore in order to better understand what human actions mean for social development and sustainability.

Hägerstrand wrote and published frequently all through his life, and over the years his texts were published in a rich variety of journals, proceedings, books and edited volumes, and it is not an easy task to find them all.” During his last 10 years, he wrote the second book of his academic career, a comprehensive summary of his thinking, Tillvaroväven, which was posthumously published in 2009.* Torsten Hágerstrand died in 2004.

The following citation from Hágerstrand (1995) serves as an overall introduction to the time-geographic approach:

Our actions leave traces in the physical world. We produce things and bring about states of a sort that nature does not shape on its own. Most traces have a short duration. Others lead to more lasting changes. In most cases there is a limited and comprehensible purpose behind the specific actions. In addition, most actions — probably all — have consequences which were not taken into account in the moment of action. It is quite easy to discover such unintended consequences in the immediate neighbourhood. Consequences with a wide reach and a slow course are more difficult to grasp.

(Hágerstrand 1995: 35)

1 The sorting, of course, appears differently as the social context changes.

2 What is defined as waste also varies depending of what societal context is under analysis.

3 The whole body of knowledge mastered by the household members concerned the quality of the soil, animal health, building techniques, slaughter, milk production and conservation (e.g. butter and cheese), production of tools, preservation of food raw materials to make them usable over a long time, adjusting the meal to the seasonal variation of available raw materials, and so on.

4 He was one of the founding fathers, influential researchers from different disciplines and research areas, who actively worked for the realization of the Department of Thematic Studies in Linkóping University in the late 1970s. The department started its operations in 1980 and is focused on interdisciplinary research in thematic research areas of societal importance (initially it considered Technology and Social Change, Water in Nature and Society and Communication; later Child Studies and Gender Studies were also established). See www.liu.se/tema.

5 The Swedish Riksbank celebrated its 300-year anniversary in 1966 by initiating a research foundation directed to research in humanities and social science, Riksbankens Jubileumsfond.

6 Among the group members who became professors were Bo Lenntorp at Stockholm University, Sture Öberg at Uppsala University, and Kajsa Ellegård, Tora Friberg and Stefan Anderberg at Linkóping University.

7 Lenntorp (2004) contains references to the publications by Torsten Hägerstrand.

8 Tillvarováven (The Fabric of Existence) was not ready when Hägerstrand died in 2004 and it was edited by Ellegárd and Svedin. It was published by the research council Formas in 2009.

Hägerstrand, T. 1970a. What about people in regional science? Regional Science Association Papers, Vol. XXIV, pp. 7-21.

Hägerstrand, T. 1970b. Urbaniseringen — stadsutveckling och regionala olikheter. Lund, Sweden: C.W.K. Gleerup.

Hägerstrand, T. 1976. Geography and the study of interaction between nature and society. Geoforum, Vol. 7, pp. 329-344.

Hágerstrand, T. 1983. In search for the sources of concepts. In The Practice of Geography. A. Buttimer (ed.). Harlow: Longman Higher Education, pp. 238-256.

Hägerstrand, T. 1988. Krafter som format det svenska kulturlandskapet (1988). Mark och vatten ár 2010. Bostadsdepartementet, Stockholm, pp. 16-55. In German: Die Kráfte, welche die Schwedische Kulturlandschaft formten (1989). Münchener Geographische Hefte, 62:15-59.

Hägerstrand, T. 1995. Action in the physical everyday world. In Diffusing Geography. Essays for Peter Haggett. A.D. Cliff, P.R. Gould, A.G. Hoare and N.J. Thrift (eds). Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 35-45.

Hägerstrand, T. 2009. Tillvarováven. K. Ellegård and U. Svedin (eds). Stockholm, Sweden: Formas.

Lenntorp, B. 2004. Publications by Torsten Hágerstrand 1938-2004. Geografiska Annaler. Series B Human Geography, Vol. 86 B, No. 4.

Lenntorp, B. 2010. Torsten Hágerstrands várldsbild — nágra tankar om dess utveckling. Geografiska Notiser, 2.

Simple and complicated

Hägerstrand (1985: 195) wrote about the time-geographic approach, “The approach is not in itself a theory. It is rather an ontological contribution preceding formation of theory.” He was struggling with the problem of the very short step between “what is self-evident and extremely complicated” (1985: 195). When looking at the development of the time-geographic approach in retrospect it is clear that it takes its points of departure in phenomena that seem self-evident, and utilizes these phenomena to construct concepts that assist interpretation of complicated relations and appearances at the micro and macro level.

The concept of time-geography in itself implies an assumption that time and space" (or place) exist, and the hyphen indicates that the interplay between the two dimensions is considered. In this chapter, the ontological grounds of the time-geographic approach are presented. It concerns assumptions about time and space/place and presents the roots for combining these dimensions, based on an example from Hagerstrand”s early research on migration in Asby, Sweden. The importance of the thorough empiric research laying the ground for the development of the basic ideas of the time-geographic approach is thereby underlined.