Time geography

Time geography or time space geography is an evolving transdisciplinary perspective on spatial and temporal processes and events such as social interaction, ecological interaction, social and environmental change, and biographies of individuals. Time geography "is not a subject area per se", but rather an integrative ontological framework and visual language in which space and time are basic dimensions of analysis of dynamic processes. Time geography was originally developed by human geographers, but today it is applied in multiple fields related to transportation, regional planning, geography, anthropology, time use research, ecology, environmental science, and public health. According to Swedish geographer Bo Lenntorp: "It is a basic approach, and every researcher can connect it to theoretical considerations in her or his own way."

Since the 1980s, time geography has been used by researchers in the social sciences, the biological sciences, and in interdisciplinary fields. In 1993, British geographer Gillian Rose noted that "time geography shares the feminist interest in the quotidian paths traced by people, and again like feminism, links such paths, by thinking about constraints, to the larger structures of society." However, she noted that time geography had not been applied to issues important to feminists, and she called it a form of "social science masculinity". Over the following decades, feminist geographers have revisited time geography and have begun to use it as a tool to address feminist issues. GIS software has been developed to compute and analyze time geographic problems at a variety of spatial scales. Such analyses have used different types of network datasets (such as walking networks, highway networks, and public transit schedules) as well as a variety of visualization strategies. Specialized software such as GeoTime has been developed to facilitate time geographic visualization and visual analytics. Time geography has also been used as a form of therapeutic assessment in mental health. Benjamin Bach and colleagues have generalized the space time cube into a framework for temporal data visualization that applies to all data that can be represented in two dimensions plus time. In the COVID 19 pandemic, time geography approaches were applied to identify close contacts. The pandemic imposed restrictions on the physical mobility of humans, which invited new applications of time geography in the increasingly virtualized post Covid era.