Time geography

"[4] The Swedish geographer Torsten Hägerstrand created time geography in the mid-1960s based on ideas he had developed during his earlier empirical research on human migration patterns in Sweden.

[5] He sought "some way of finding out the workings of large socio-environmental mechanisms" using "a physical approach involving the study of how events occur in a time-space framework".

[7] Hägerstrand's earliest formulation of time geography informally described its key ontological features: "In time-space the individual describes a path" within a situational context; "life paths become captured within a net of constraints, some of which are imposed by physiological and physical necessities and some imposed by private and common decisions".

"[13] By 1981, geographers Nigel Thrift and Allan Pred were already defending time geography against those who would see it "merely as a rigid descriptive model of spatial and temporal organization which lends itself to accessibility constraint analysis (and related exercises in social engineering).

"[14] They argued that time geography is not just a model of constraints; it is a flexible and evolving way of thinking about reality that can complement a wide variety of theories and research methods.

[26] The pandemic imposed restrictions on the physical mobility of humans, which invited new applications of time geography in the increasingly virtualized post-Covid era.