Hägerstrand Meets Big Data: Time-Geography in the Age of Mobility Analytics

Antonio Paez
School of Earth, Environment & Society McMaster University Canada

Time-geography, the brainchild of Swedish geographer Torsten Hägerstrand, has for decades been a key element to understanding and explaining space-time behavior. Hägerstrand, parting from first principles, was able to deduce essential rules that describe the potential and constraints of space-time behavior. This he achieved with a prodigious leap of the imagination, decades before technologies such as GPS in phones, fitness trackers, and so on reached mainstream consumers. Today, massive amounts of data are generated that describe movement at a level of resolution that was perhaps unimaginable even two or three decades ago. Mobility analytics has progressed in leaps and bounds, meeting Hägerstrand's ideas from the past with technologies of the future. In this keynote address, I will review the trajectory of time-geography and what modern mobility analytics mean to Hägerstrand's fundamental conceptual framework, and what in turn, what the framework can tell us about the future of mobility analytics.

The speaker

Antonio Paez is Professor of Transportation Geography at McMaster University. Recent research includes studies on accessibility, transportation and social exclusion, and the influence of the built and social environments on travel. Prof. Páez main field of expertise is in quantitative approaches, and currently supervises two students (one PhD student and one MA student) on theses that primarily use qualitative methods, in particular Grounded Theory. Prof. Páez is author or co-author of 111 papers and co-editor of the books Population Loss: The Role of Transportation and Other Issues, Progress in Spatial Analysis: Methods and Applications, and Spatial Analysis in Health Geography. He currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Geographical Systems. See more at his website.