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| The shrinking map of the world through innovations in transport |
Time and space
are essential categories of human existence, through which we can measure and
perceive our presence.
While in physics time is an arduous and contentious notion, it does not interfere with our own stubborn ideas of time around which we establish quotidian practices. We are familiarized with time as we pretend to domesticate it through the illusion of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years, as if we could impose everything on a definite objective time scale.
Such systemic approach is one of many possible simplifications and is far from absolute, as time is susceptible and very vulnerable to constant and inevitable subversions. Our perceptual apparatus and mental processes are repeatedly hacked all the time, making delightful hours pass by so rapidly, we can’t even notice, or even making a single second feel like decades.
We habitually consider space as an objective feature of things, which can ultimately be touched and measured: it has shape, area, volume, as well as direction and distance. Similarly to time, we can’t deny that our own individual experience constantly trick us into realms of perception, producing psychological maps and spaces that are much more related to our own fiction and imagination than to spatial reality itself.
Transformations in our conceptual contraptions, including ways of representing time and space, can converge to material significance on the assembling of daily life. Ultimately, the way we represent and symbolize time and space is crucial, as it disturbs our interpretation and consequent actions towards reality.
In this sense, Torsten Hägerstrand’s study carried in the mid-1960s is relevant here mainly in terms of representing time and space in the simplest and most comprehensible way. The study explores the principles of time and space behavior through an analysis of individual biographies. Each individual is regarded as an agent engaged in endeavors that consumes an amount of time while drifting in space. Each individual biography can be traced according to a life path in time and space, usually consisting of a quotidian sequence of motions, such as the shift from home to work, school, shopping, leisure as well as the way back home. Additionally it can be extended to migratory arrangements over phases of an entire life span. Such life paths are portrayed diagrammatically in three-dimensional epuras.
Hägerstrand highlights that predetermined time resources and the friction of distance – measured by time consumption or expenditure related to travels – can catalyze or potentially restrict an individual’s mobility. Time for leisure needs to be found, and social encounters are susceptible to the necessity of intersection of two or more time-space paths in order to establish any social interaction.
One can say that compiling vast empirical records on time and space biographies is useless to respond deeper questions as it would be imperative to resource to the phenomenological and socio-psychological approaches to time and space that have been put forward by writers such as Pierre Bordieu, Michel de Certeau and Foucault.
Still, the point we are attempting to make here is far more unpretentious. From the moment in which capitalism has been consolidated as the dominant mode of production, the processes of social reproduction and the material practices are in constant alteration. Consequently, the meanings as well as the objective qualities of time and space are also changing. The example here is as practical and direct as it gets: in 2008, the Comprehensive Transportation Study published by the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority revealed a master plan of expansion for Mumbai Metro projecting a network of 450 kilometers with the horizon for 2031.
Such expansion, which might be mistakenly overseen as a mere technocratic and unsociable plan of transportation, is one of the essential operations that can secure the unpredictability of life, being ultimately supported by the possibility of directly transforming quotidian conditions of Mumbai’s population. Such opportunity should not be wasted.
While in physics time is an arduous and contentious notion, it does not interfere with our own stubborn ideas of time around which we establish quotidian practices. We are familiarized with time as we pretend to domesticate it through the illusion of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years, as if we could impose everything on a definite objective time scale.
Such systemic approach is one of many possible simplifications and is far from absolute, as time is susceptible and very vulnerable to constant and inevitable subversions. Our perceptual apparatus and mental processes are repeatedly hacked all the time, making delightful hours pass by so rapidly, we can’t even notice, or even making a single second feel like decades.
We habitually consider space as an objective feature of things, which can ultimately be touched and measured: it has shape, area, volume, as well as direction and distance. Similarly to time, we can’t deny that our own individual experience constantly trick us into realms of perception, producing psychological maps and spaces that are much more related to our own fiction and imagination than to spatial reality itself.
Transformations in our conceptual contraptions, including ways of representing time and space, can converge to material significance on the assembling of daily life. Ultimately, the way we represent and symbolize time and space is crucial, as it disturbs our interpretation and consequent actions towards reality.
In this sense, Torsten Hägerstrand’s study carried in the mid-1960s is relevant here mainly in terms of representing time and space in the simplest and most comprehensible way. The study explores the principles of time and space behavior through an analysis of individual biographies. Each individual is regarded as an agent engaged in endeavors that consumes an amount of time while drifting in space. Each individual biography can be traced according to a life path in time and space, usually consisting of a quotidian sequence of motions, such as the shift from home to work, school, shopping, leisure as well as the way back home. Additionally it can be extended to migratory arrangements over phases of an entire life span. Such life paths are portrayed diagrammatically in three-dimensional epuras.
Hägerstrand highlights that predetermined time resources and the friction of distance – measured by time consumption or expenditure related to travels – can catalyze or potentially restrict an individual’s mobility. Time for leisure needs to be found, and social encounters are susceptible to the necessity of intersection of two or more time-space paths in order to establish any social interaction.
One can say that compiling vast empirical records on time and space biographies is useless to respond deeper questions as it would be imperative to resource to the phenomenological and socio-psychological approaches to time and space that have been put forward by writers such as Pierre Bordieu, Michel de Certeau and Foucault.
Still, the point we are attempting to make here is far more unpretentious. From the moment in which capitalism has been consolidated as the dominant mode of production, the processes of social reproduction and the material practices are in constant alteration. Consequently, the meanings as well as the objective qualities of time and space are also changing. The example here is as practical and direct as it gets: in 2008, the Comprehensive Transportation Study published by the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority revealed a master plan of expansion for Mumbai Metro projecting a network of 450 kilometers with the horizon for 2031.
Such expansion, which might be mistakenly overseen as a mere technocratic and unsociable plan of transportation, is one of the essential operations that can secure the unpredictability of life, being ultimately supported by the possibility of directly transforming quotidian conditions of Mumbai’s population. Such opportunity should not be wasted.
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