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

Revealing Cultural Ecosystem Services through Instagram Images: The Potential of Social Media Volunteered Geographic Information for Urban Green Infrastructure Planning and Governance

With the prevalence of smartphones, new ways of engaging citizens and stakeholders in urban planning and governance are emerging. The technologies in smartphones allow citizens to act as sensors of their environment, producing and sharing rich spatial data useful for new types of collaborative governance set-ups. Data derived from Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) can support accessible, transparent, democratic, inclusive, and locally-based governance situations of interest to planners, citizens, politicians, and scientists. However, there are still uncertainties about how to actually conduct this in practice. This study explores how social media VGI can be used to document spatial tendencies regarding citizens’ uses and perceptions of urban nature with relevance for urban green space governance. Via the hashtag #sharingcph, created by the City of Copenhagen in 2014, VGI data consisting of geo-referenced images were collected from Instagram, categorised according to their content and analysed according to their spatial distribution patterns. The results show specific spatial distributions of the images and main hotspots. Many possibilities and much potential of using VGI for generating, sharing, visualising and communicating knowledge about citizens’ spatial uses and preferences exist, but as a tool to support scientific and democratic interaction, VGI data is challenged by practical, technical and ethical concerns. More research is needed in order to better understand the usefulness and application of this rich data source to governance

Public participation GIS can help assess multiple dimensions of environmental justice in urban green and blue space planning

In the last two decades, there has been an exponential increase in application of public participation GIS (PPGIS) methods to urban green and blue space (UGBS) planning. However, integrating different elements of environ-mental justice in PPGIS research is still in its infancy, especially in regards to the deep and less visible issues related to recognition and participation of different groups in local green space planning and management. Here we present a new method for assessing perceived recognition and procedural justice with respect to UGBS in the Amager island of Copenhagen, Denmark. We collected survey data together with 2187 place-based values and preferences from 298 local residents. Using Exploratory Factor Analysis, we classified respondents in four clusters representing low to high perceived recognition and procedural justice. We then examined how these clusters relate to socio-demographics and the spatial distribution of mapped values and preferences. Results indicated no significant differences in terms of income and age between clusters. However, there was clear variation in the spatial distribution and type of values and preferences respondents from different clusters assigned, particularly for those who feel unrecognized and do not participate in local environmental decision -making compared to all other groups. In addition, gender had a significant effect on the perceptions of recog-nition and procedure. Female respondents scored lower on procedural justice than male and mapped landscape values and preferences closer to home than males, thus suggesting that gender inequalities can be deeply embedded in everyday public spaces and practices. Planning inclusive and environmentally just UGBS requires not only incorporating such gender perspectives, but a more flexible, intersectional and relational understanding of space that reflects the everyday needs of different and marginalized groups

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

Gardening for wildlife : A mixed-methods exploration of the factors underlying engagement in wildlife-friendly gardening

1. Private domestic gardens have immense potential to contribute to urban biodi-versity conservation. However, they are divided into small private plots and man-aged individually by garden owners. Therefore, engagement in wildlife-friendly gardening (WFG), which entails alternative management and design choices, re-lies on the individual willingness of each garden owner.2. Using an online survey and qualitative walking interviews with garden owners, our study explores individual internal and external factors underlying engage-ment in WFG. We interpret and reflect on our findings in the context of gardening as a relational practice between people and nature.3. Our findings suggest that motivations for gardening play a central role in how internal and external factors promote or impede WFG. For example, motivations towards organic gardening and learning from nature promote WFG, whereas per-sonal and family care and well- being motivations seem to impede it.4. The perceived and actual garden area, as well as self-reported insufficient knowl-edge and social norms, covary the most with engagement in WFG. Engagement in WFG relates to people's relationships with nature, as embodied in social norms of community acceptance and cohesion, and care and respect for nature and others.5. Future research into pro-environmental behaviours in gardens should adopt more relational approaches that go beyond the individual self and take better account of feedback between individual actions and social relations.Peer reviewe