Abstract
Traditional urban geography tends to place its research focus on the spatial differentiation of the functions and facilities in the metropolitan region. Little attention, however, has been paid to the drastic changes in everyday life of the urban residents. This review essay tries to overview the recent research trends in various academic fields which have a strong concern with human activities in an urban environment. In this way, some perspectives are suggested for human activity studies in urban geography.
Human activities are allocated within both limited time resources and a constrained human activity space, and form the so-called‘human activity pattern’. Here we tentatively subdivided the researches on human activity into three categories: i. e.‘time budget and allocation study’which highlights the time dimension of human activity; ‘spatial behavior study’Which emphasizes the spatial choice; and‘transportation study’ which pays special attention to the human travel pattern. But these three types of studies are intricately entangled with each other and should be treated as a whole. Therefore, in this review essay, we try to understand each of these studies in its own research context and examine how other two types of studies could be evaluated in that context.
Our viewpoint is briefly explained in Chapter One, and in the following chapter, we review the time budget and allocation studies in sociology, home economics and microeconomics which treat the time dimension of human activity. Basically, these studies treat the time allocation simply between production and consumption within 24 hours, and tend to be static analyses.
In Chapter Three, we trace human activity pattern study in urban planning, human geography and transportation studies. These studies try to answer the question, ‘what activities do people engage in, and why?’The recent. frontier of this research interest is modelling of people's choice of activities within the constrained choice settings. Currently, research foci are on the dynamics of activity pattern change in the long-term and on repetitive patterns in the short-term.
Chapter Four takes up time-geographic research in human geography for its tremendous influence on time-related studies. One of the most pronounced characteristics in time-geographic research is its endeavor to incorporate both time and space dimensions as indivisible entities in our understanding of the society. Introduction of an incorporated time-space entity is useful for representation of human activities. More importantly, however, it opens the way to mediation between individual behavior and social structure.
Finally in Chapter Five, we discuss new perspectives for understanding of contemporary society. They would emerge from the time-geographical application of human activity studies. Three of them seem especially important. The first perspective is on the value of the identification procedure for ideal types of human activities. The second is on the use of examining human activities from the point of constraints. The third is on the need for a dynamic understanding of the interaction between individuals and society.
However affluent it may seem, life in contemporary society is quite deprived when we see it from the point of everday time use. Economists can give support to the fact that economic growth makes time resources more scarce and our everyday life shifts from a time-intensive to a goods-intensive life-style. But we are not satisfied with this trend. We are still looking for clues to escape from the traps of economic growth. We hope this tiny study may help to research this horizon.
