GPS Tracking Data on Marginalised Citizens' Spatial Patterns: Towards Inclusive Urban Planning

Knowledge about how marginalised citizens use urban spaces is hard to access and apply in urban planning and policy. Based on current debates around "smart cities" and "smart governance," the City of Odense, in Denmark, has tested the integration of "smart engagement" by means of GPS-tracking techniques into the municipality’s cross-sectoral strategy for an "inclusive city." In a period of austerity, cities have the incentive to optimise public services. Hence, GPS-tracking data was produced by 64 marginalised citizens, resulting in a data inventory covering three weeks of spatial behaviour. First, this article shows how these GPS-tracking data were processed into maps without revealing person-sensitive spatial patterns. Secondly, the article explores whether such maps and the GPS-tracking techniques that underpin them are considered valid, relevant, and applicable to urban planning from the perspectives of marginalised citizens, their representatives, and municipal planners and professionals respectively. The GPS project showed shortcomings as regards the quality of the data inventory and the representativity of the mapped behaviour, which made them inapplicable for optimising dedicated public service. However, the article also finds that the GPS-based maps succeeded in being non-person sensitive and in providing a valuable platform for citizen-centric dialogues with marginalised citizens with the potential for raising awareness and increasing knowledge about this citizen group’s living conditions and urban lives. An important derived effect of the project is that it has ensured ongoing cross-sectoral collaboration among a range of professional stakeholders, imperative for ensuring creating greater equity in urban planning

Børns transportvaner – trafikstrukturer og børns selvstændige mobilitet

I forskningsprojektet ”Kvarteret som ramme om børns hverdagsliv” forsøger at indfange børns hverdagsliv i et helhedsperspektiv ved at belyse på hvilke måder kvarterts fysiske, funktionelle, sociale, kulturelle og tidslige strukturer influerer på det. Børns hverdagsliv foregår mange steder, og de mange dagligt besøgte steder involverer ofte et stort transportforbrug. Ved at se på samspillet mellem hvor børns hverdagsliv foregår, og hvordan deres hverdagsliv tidsligt er struktureret analyseres børns selvstændige mobilitet, transportbehov samt transportvaner. Det empiriske materiale består af 4 casestudier af bykvarterer der er forskellige hvad angår bebyggelsesstruktur, trafikale forhold, indretning af grønne rum, lokalisering af funktioner m.m. Her er 61 børn i alderen 5-11 år blevet interviewet om bl.a. deres daglige transportruter og –vaner. I dette papir præsenteres nogle af de foreløbige resultater af denne undersøgelse

Children’s velo-mobility – how cycling children are ‘made’ and sustained.

Sustainable mobilities play a dominate role in low carbon futures and cycling is an integral element. Children are heirs of transport cultures and crucial for future sustainable mobility. Moreover cycling is important for children’s independent mobility and geographical experience.Dominating approaches in transport research, including cycling, understand travel behaviour individualistic and lack to grasp the relational complexities, which are inevitable when considering children’s mobilities. Furthermore has children’s cycling largely been studied as independent mobility and active school travel. How cycling is learned and constituted, and how cycling skills are consolidated, extended and turned into a stabilized practice remains unstudied. Drawing on in-depth interview data from the region of Copenhagen, Denmark, among families with children (N=20) the paper provides new insights into how children, parents, and the locale socio-spatial environment through collaborations, negations and experiments co-produce independent cycling.It introduces a three-step model for conceptualizing children’s cycling deriving from processes of gradually enlarging the geographical experience and partial embodying of know-how of traffic power relations and mobility technology. The paper examines how parents’ perception of risks are transgressed by cycle training and how cycling is fitted into complex household routines. By shedding light on the sensitive mechanisms that ‘make’ and sustain cycling children the paper inform a discussion of urban planning and transport policy measures important for stabilizing sustainable mobility

Children’s velo-mobility – how cycling children are ‘made’ and sustained.

Sustainable mobilities play a dominate role in low carbon futures and cycling is an integral element. Children are heirs of transport cultures and crucial for future sustainable mobility. Moreover cycling is important for children’s independent mobility and geographical experience.Dominating approaches in transport research, including cycling, understand travel behaviour individualistic and lack to grasp the relational complexities, which are inevitable when considering children’s mobilities. Furthermore has children’s cycling largely been studied as independent mobility and active school travel. How cycling is learned and constituted, and how cycling skills are consolidated, extended and turned into a stabilized practice remains unstudied. Drawing on in-depth interview data from the region of Copenhagen, Denmark, among families with children (N=20) the paper provides new insights into how children, parents, and the locale socio-spatial environment through collaborations, negations and experiments co-produce independent cycling.It introduces a three-step model for conceptualizing children’s cycling deriving from processes of gradually enlarging the geographical experience and partial embodying of know-how of traffic power relations and mobility technology. The paper examines how parents’ perception of risks are transgressed by cycle training and how cycling is fitted into complex household routines. By shedding light on the sensitive mechanisms that ‘make’ and sustain cycling children the paper inform a discussion of urban planning and transport policy measures important for stabilizing sustainable mobility

The role of urban form in sustaining public transport, car, and bicycle based travel styles.

In the quest for sustainable mobility futures the promotion of car independent or less car dependent lifestyles is often mentioned. This partly reflects an acknowledgement of car use and travel as part of a pattern or style in which behaviors and possessions are interdependent and potentially reinforcing. Little research has, however, targeted behaviors in this manner, but generally tend to focus on the number of trips, km of travel or similar. This paper makes the experiment of analyzing urban form effects on discrete weekly travel styles of 1970 (N) 16-74 year old respondents based on a two step methodology. In the first step, the weekly use of travel modes was analyzed by means of principal component analysis and k-means cluster analysis to identify discrete travel styles among adult Danes based on the main differences in the sample. Four travel styles were found and can be labeled as public transport (11% of the respondents); car-alone (36% of the respondents); and bicycle based travel styles (29% of the respondents); whereas the fourth style was mixed with important contributions from car-alone, co-driving and walking (24% of the respondents). In the second step the urban form correlates of the travel styles was analyzed in a multinomial logistic regression model with control for respondent attitudes as well as transport-related residential preferences to control for self-selection. Four urban form and infrastructure variables were found to be significantly related to the travel styles of the respondents: the distance to a larger service centre/urban centre; proximity to S-train or Metro stations in the Greater Copenhagen area; service offers within walking distance; and finally population density within a larger neighborhood area (up to 1,5 km airline distance from the dwelling of the respondents). Separation from the large service centers as well as proximity to the well serviced and highly connected S-train and Metro network increases the probability of a public transport based travel style. Separation from the large service centers – indicating also a low level of accessibility – also increases the probability of a car-based travel style. Cycling based travel styles appear mainly to be affected by local opportunities: positively if there is a high density in a larger neighborhood surrounding the dwelling, but negatively if there are good service offers within walking distance. The results indicate that the travel styles are mainly shaped by the respondents needs to overcome a travel distance from their home location to important clusters of activities, as well as the degree to which the local accessibility offers support for cycling. The effects of proximity to S-train or Metro indicate that transport services can play a role, but also that a very high level of service and connectivity is likely to be required. The travel styles and their correlations with urban form and transport variables also provide new evidence on how the different modes combine. The results indicate that walking and cycling for transport are not joined, but takes place in different travel styles that are living in different locations. Thus even in the ‘cycling nation’ Denmark, there is a substantial group that prefers walking over cycling. For public transport and cycling the results point to the existence of public transport travel styles that are dependent upon other access modes than walking, and that cycling for access as well as cycling as main mode are important. Thus, cycling is an integral part of public transport travel styles. Reversely cycling based travel styles can exist without significantly higher use of public transport compared to other non-public transport travel styles. The interactions and dependencies between the travel styles should be the topic of further research aiming to understand mobility and the preconditions for promoting less car dependent lifestyles

Constructing Common Meeting Places: A Strategy for Mitigating the Social Isolation of Disadvantaged Neighbourhoods?

Community planning has undergone changes in direction over time, from a traditional neighbourhood approach seeking to ensure well-functioning local communities to a newer focus on the feasibility of neighbourhood-based urban renewal for combating segregation. The latter initially concentrated on the internal social relations of disadvantaged neighbourhoods, but nowadays the focus for interventions is changing towards opening up such neighbourhoods to improve their external relations with more affluent surrounding districts. This article unfolds the visions related to a new urban planning strategy for constructing common meeting places inside disadvantaged neighbourhoods, which seem closely related to the political discourses about the need for opening these neighbourhoods up. Specifically, the article scrutinises the visions for two meeting places currently being constructed in two Danish neighbourhoods characterised as disadvantaged, and it examines which problems these meeting places seek to solve and how they are intended to provide for publicness. The study reveals that, despite being part of the same strategic funding programme and having similar problem framings, it is claimed that the two future meeting places will provide for publicness in distinct and context-specific ways. Furthermore, we show that the way problem representations entangled in specific political discourses are being manifested in specific local planning strategies may have contingent, yet potentially pervasive social and physical consequences for local neighbourhoods