Equitable Technologies for Smarter Urbanism: Enhancing Priority Car Parking at Western Sydney University

Relocating university campuses to Central Business Districts (CBDs) changes the way people travel to and from campus. While CBDs are often considered accessible due to the increased availability of public transport and non-motorised transit options (e.g. walking, cycling), urban locations can also lead to social exclusion and transport disadvantage for some. For example, people with disabilities and caring commitments who are dependent on private car transport to facilitate their mobility, can find it more difficult to access urban campuses when accessible parking and transport options are not readily available. In 2018, Western Sydney University opened its second city-based campus in the City of Liverpool, located in Southwest Sydney, New South Wales. With limited on-site car parking in the campuses’ basement, plans were implemented to provide staff and students with disabilities and caring commitments with priority parking. DIVVY Parking Pty Ltd was commissioned to deliver a car parking service using their app

The lingering moment

This chapter draws upon recent PhD research that sought to explore the notion of transformative travel – the long-term changes some individuals attribute to their physical travel experiences. From 2005 to 2010, seventy-eight participants from seventeen different nationalities reported their experiences on a purpose-built research website. These experiences were diverse, stretching from pleasure travel, to study abroad, working, volunteering, migration and even military service. A series of longitudinal interviews was conducted every two years via email to investigate the continuing transformation of participants’ lives and thinking. These interviews took place in 2007 and 2009/2010 and required participants to reflect upon previous responses (attached to the email), identify any progression of these ideas and behaviours and detail whether further transformations had occurred, not necessarily through physical travel. In addition to gathering these stories, I also engaged in a series of journeys myself – four weeks in East Timor, two months in Southeast Asia (Cambodia and Laos) and two months in West Africa (Niger, Benin, Togo, Burkina Faso, Mali and Côte d’Ivoire). The research argued that travellers do not simply physically relocate themselves to a new location, undergo a transformative experience and return home with a static, altered identity. Individuals inhabit mobile places, alive with physical, communicative, virtual and imaginative flows of people and information. Physical travel becomes just one element within this fluid landscape. This chapter, however, does not focus on transformative travel per se. Rather, it looks at those findings from the research that relate specifically to the return experience

Travels Through East Timor: A Sensual Essay

The first in a three part series of companion books to Transformative Travel in a Mobile World

Investigating perpetual travel : email interviews and longitudinal methods in travel, tourism and mobilities research

Corporeal travel is deeply entwined in daily experiences, performances, sensualities, imaginings, memories, communications and mobilities (Leed 1991, Rojek and Urry 1997, Urry 2007). As such, in a liquid modern world, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between notions such as home, away, departure, arrival, return, before, during and after travel is a perpetual state of being (Bauman 2000, Urry 2007). In this context, researchers such as Urry (2007), Hannam (2009) and Mavric and Urry (2009) argue that physical travel should not be separated from other forms of mobility; courtesy of historic and contemporary mobilities, they are entangled. Corporeal travel is informed by (and informs) all other mobilities, whether they be physical, virtual, communicative and/or imaginative (Urry 2007); albeit to varying degrees, an individual is travelling before, during and after any given physical travel experience. In addition, physical travel does not end upon one's 'return' home it is continued in a variety of ways, including through photographs, objects, social relationships, roles, routines and performance and through inhabiting a fluid place (Lean 2012a). Given the growing acknowledgement of the perpetual nature of travel and its intersection with mobile lifestyles (as evidenced in this volume), there is a need for a concomitant shift in the methods used for investigating this phenomenon (Uny 2007, Buscher, Urry and Witchger 2011). Methods that can observe lived experience over an extended period need to be employed. The following chapter reflects upon methods used in an ongoing exploration of transformation through travel. Commencing in 2005, the study utilizes email interviews, in a longitudinal design, to investigate the accounts of individuals who believe they have been 'transformed' by physical travel. It explores how these corporeal travel experiences and transformations intersect with other mobilities and experiences over the respondent's life course. Drawing upon participant feedback and literature on email interviews and longitudinal research, I reflect upon my experiences using this method and provide a series of considerations for other researchers who may want to employ a similar methodological design in their own projects

Transformative Travel in a Mobile World

This book presents the re-theorization of travel and transformation through the lens of the mobilities paradigm. It explores the complexity of factors that influence the thinking and behaviors a traveler brings to a journey, how these become entwined in experiences during travel and how travel experiences may continue upon one’s return

Travels Through West Africa: A Sensual Essay

The third in a three part series of companion books to Transformative Travel in a Mobile World

Transformative travel : inspiring sustainability

Tourism can be a powerful vehicle for changing people's thinking and behavior both during travel and upon their return home. While proponents of sustainable travel are to be applauded for their work in delivering benefits to host communities, this chapter outlines a research project which argues that the concept should take a broader focus than just the destination. In order to fully realize ideals like sustainability, the industry must work toward inspiring enduring changes of behavior that ensure the health and wellbeing of the individual and their economic, sociocultural, and ecological environments. These changes of action will help deliver individual and global wellness

Travels Through Cambodia and Laos: A Sensual Essay

The second in a three part series of companion books to Transformative Travel in a Mobile World

Travel and imagination : an invitation

There is always a risk when we venture onto new theoretical terrain that we will forget some of the important things we learnt elsewhere. In our calls for a retheorization of the imagination together with travel, then, we want to be explicit with our intentions to bring with us that critical work we have already commenced upon elsewhere that parries with issues of power, ideology, politics and social justice. Those narratives of inequality that we see and deal with in everyday lives can follow us into our imaginative travels, too; those divisions and asymmetries that align and spring from identities defined around gender, sex, religion, age, health, class and ethnicity. It can be, when all said and done, as decidedly undemocratic as anywhere else, as fragile and dissonant. Our invitation to travel and imagination is, then, a cautiously optimistic one

Surveying the state of community relations in public schools

An understanding of teacher experiences, attitudes and knowledge is critical for developing multicultural education programs and policy. This paper draws upon the findings of the online Multicultural Education Survey of all public school teachers in New South Wales (May–June 2011). The survey showed an encouraging teacher disposition toward diversity, suggesting a widely held openness to cultural difference. It also found that teachers are supportive of multicultural education and strongly support anti-racism in schools. Teachers were, however, less likely than the general population to acknowledge racism as a problem in Australian society, and only half agreed that racism was a problem in schools. One interpretation of these data is that schools could be sites of less racism, less intercultural tension, or more effective anti-racism than elsewhere in society. This positivity towards diversity and anti-racism is a resource from which to leverage multicultural education. Broadly, schools are crucibles for improving community relations and civility. The dispositions of NSW public sector teachers, as revealed in our survey, are packed with potential for enhancing society