Purposeful Moves

2021

There are deep transformations visible in the current phase of globalization and have prompted scholars to search for approaches to make sense of current socio-spatial configurations. The increased mobility across different regions is shaping society economically, socially, and politically as globalization increases. Migration remains an issue that results in new balances of power generated by the international systems.

Transportation Letters: The International Journal of Transportation Research, 2009

Lack of physical activity participation is one of the greatest challenges facing health care providers and policy makers in Canada. Increases in health problems linked to inactive lifestyles, such as obesity, heart disease, and asthma, have led health promotion experts to engage Canadians to become more active. Despite these efforts, many Canadians remain inactive and at risk. Active travel (AT), defined in this study as walking for travel, is a key form of physical activity that continues to decline. This dissertation examines the decline of AT and role the individual, physical, and social environment have on AT. The individual environment is examined by providing evidence of how perceived barriers to walking influence the AT of population sub-groups by modeling each barrier comparing agreement versus disagreement. Results find females, senior citizens, and those with a higher body mass index identify the most barriers, while young adults, parents, those owning a driver’s license, and those owning a bus pass identify the fewest barriers. The physical environment is examined by providing an improved conceptualization of the built environment (BE). First, the BE-AT relationship is examined by comparing the relationship when measuring the BE using an aggregate method with a disaggregate approach of measurement. As a result, both aggregate and disaggregate BE variables are significant, but the aggregate approach hides the fact that only two of the five BE variables are significant when using the disaggregate approach. Second, the influence the modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP) has on the relationship between AT and the BE is investigated. The results find that the relationship between AT and the BE are influenced by scale zone effect of MAUP. The social environment is examined through the adoption of a conceptual framework from the physical activity literature that combines the social environment with individual and physical environments. A series of linear regression models evaluating the different components of the social environment find that only role models and neighborhood social cohesion influence AT, despite the fact that the social environment is significantly related to walking for exercise in the literature.

Transfers, 2022

For geographers (both “physical” and “human”), all landscapes—while notionally associated with stability and permanence in the popular imagination—are unruly. By adjusting the temporal viewfinder through which a tectonic plate, mountain range, coastline, or urban settlement is viewed and speeding up the “playback,” we see that all human and non-human life is perched on a heaving, groaning, folding crust of rock. Water and vegetation, too, are never still but in constant, reshaping motion, sometimes as the result of human intervention, sometimes of their own accord. Movement—and mobility—are thus essential considerations in any conceptualization of the landscape and both the source and effect of its unruliness.

2019

ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment

Where are we at home outside home? movement is our meaning. Moving is what we do once in the public realm. Every time less do people stop in the streets and stay, wonder, sit, sing, etc. What characterizes spaces specialized in movement? Are they meeting their demands?

Recent work in sensory ethnography has drawn attention to the integration of both corporeal and cognitive dimensions in the experience of mobile practices. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Munich and its immediate surroundings, together with comparative data from Munich and London, this paper follows on from work by Edensor (2010) in linking a Lefebvrian consideration of rhythm with a concern for the sensory dimensions of mobility. In this case, the central concern shifts towards a greater focus on an exploration of the intertwined physical and emotional sensations imposed on the mobile body by its immediate surroundings and the physical environments of movement. In the sensory world of journey-making by bicycle, a process reliant on repetitive, rhythmic physical motion restricted by the mechanics of the machine itself, stopping and starting has a significantly greater impact than it does for walking. The paper therefore considers the import of the not-moving experience for journey-making by the cycle commuter. By focusing on the sensory dimensions of travel, differentiation can be made between stillness, not moving, pausing and waiting. Consideration is given to how these relate to the sensory environments of non-motorised urban mobility.