Susan Hanson

Gender, Work and Space

Gender, Work and Space explores how social boundaries are constructed between women and men, and among women living in different places. Focusing on work, the segregation of men and women into different occupations, and variations in womens work experiences in different parts of the city, the authors argue that these differences are grounded, constituted in and through, space, place, and situated social networks. The sheer range and depth of this extraordinary study throws new light on the construction of social, geographic, economic, and symbolic boundaries in ordinary lives.

The Geography of urban transportation

Part 1. Setting the Scene. Hanson, The Context of Urban Travel: Concepts and Recent Trends. Leinbach, City Interactions: The Dynamics of Passenger and Freight Flows. Muller, Transportation and Urban Form: Stages in the Spatial Evolution of the American Metropolis, Janelle, Impact of Information Technologies. Part 2. Planning for Movement within Cities. Johnston, The Urban Transportation Planning Process. Wachs, Reflections on the Planning Process. Nyerges, GIS in Urban-Regional Transportation Planning. Part 3. Policy Issues. Pucher, Public Transportation. Giuliano, Land Use Impacts of Transportation Investments: Highway and Transit. Greene, Transportation and Energy. Taylor, The Geography of Urban Transportation Finance. Deka, Social and Environmental Justice Issues in Urban Transportation. Bae, Transportaton and the Environment. Giuliano, Hanson, Managing the Auto.

Locating Globalization: Feminist (Re)readings of the Subjects and Spaces of Globalization

Abstract The literatures on economic globalization and feminist understandings of global processes have largely remained separate. In this article, our goal is to bring them into productive conversation so that research on globalization can benefit from feminist engagements with globalization. In the first section, which focuses on the conceptual challenges of bringing the economic globalization literature into conversation with feminist analysis, we identify several key exclusions in that literature and propose parallel inclusions that a feminist reading of globalization suggests. Our suggested inclusions relate to the spaces, scales, subjects, and forms of work that research on economic globalization has largely neglected. The second section takes up several key themes in the large body of feminist research on global economic processes, which is also largely absent from the economic globalization literature: the gendering of work, gender and structural adjustment programs, and mobility and diaspora. In the final section, we address the implications of feminist epistemologies and methodologies for research on economic globalization. Here we argue for grounded, collaborative studies that incorporate perspectives of the south as well as the north and that construct understandings of place and the local, as well as space and general global processes; we point to the coconstitution of different geographic scales and highlight the need for studies that cut across them. The article demonstrates how a feminist analysis of globalization entails far more than recognizing the importance of gender; it requires substantial rethinking of how to conceptualize, study, and act in relation to economic globalization.

GENDER DIFFERENCES IN WORK-TRIP LENGTH: EXPLANATIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

Many studies have shown that women work closer to home than do men, but few have probed the reasons for this persistent finding and none has done so at the metropolitan scale or considered the link between journey-to-work patterns and the occupational segregation of women. We first review the various possible reasons for womens shorter journeys to work and then examine each of these with data from the Baltimore, Maryland SMSA. We compare the work-trip distances and times of 303 employed women with those of 484 men, drawn from the 1977 Baltimore Travel Demand Data. As expected, womens work trips are significantly shorter than mens in both travel time and distance Womens lower incomes, their concentration in female-dominated occupations, and their greater reliance on the bus and auto passenger modes all help to explain their shorter work trips Male-female differences in part— versus full-time work status, occupational group, and, most surprisingly, household responsibility, did not, however, contribute ...

RECONCEPTUALIZING THE LINKS BETWEEN HOME AND WORK IN URBAN GEOGRAPHY

The link between home and work is one of the cornerstones of urban geography. We argue that this link has been conceptualized in a limited and limiting way, and yet this overly simplified view of t...

Gender and mobility: new approaches for informing sustainability

Feminists have long known that gender and mobility are inseparable, influencing each other in profound and often subtle ways. Tackling complex societal problems, such as sustainability, will require improved understandings of the relationships between gender and mobility. In this essay I propose new approaches to the study of mobility and gender that will provide the knowledge base needed to inform policies on sustainable mobility. Early in the essay I survey the large literature on gender and mobility, teasing out what I see as two disparate strands of thinking that have remained badly disconnected from each other. One of these strands has informed understandings of how mobility shapes gender, while the other has examined how gender shapes mobility. Work on how mobility shapes gender has emphasized gender, to the neglect of mobility, whereas research on how gender shapes mobility has dealt with mobility in great detail and paid much less attention to gender. From this overview of the literature, I identify knowledge gaps that must be bridged if feminist research on gender and mobility is to assist in charting paths to sustainable mobility. I argue for the need to shift the research agenda so that future research will synthesize these two strands of thinking along three lines: (1) across ways of thinking about gender and mobility, (2) across quantitative and qualitative approaches, and (3) across places. In the final part of the essay I suggest how to achieve this synthesis by making geographic, social and cultural context central to our analyses.

The Travel-Activity Patterns of Urban Residents: Dimensions and Relationships to Sociodemographic Characteristics

The purpose of this paper is to explore a new approach in investigating the relationships between observed travel behavior and the characteristics of the individual traveler. Most previous studies have addressed the question by first dividing the population on the basis of one or more variables assumed salient and by then comparing the observed behavior patterns of the resultant groups. This study pursues an alternative approach by using disaggregate travel-diary data to generate first a variety of measures of the individuals complex travel-activity pattern in order to establish the dimensions of the observed complex travel patterns and then determining which individual or household characteristics are related to each of these dimensions of travel.

Geography and the construction of difference

Abstract There is growing evidence of ‘horizontal hostilities’ among women: many women are affirming their identities along axes of class, race, sexuality, age and/or relationship to colonialism. Within recent feminist writing, geography—space, place and location—has been used as a vehicle for rethinking a feminist affinity that does not erase or undermine ‘difference’. We review contemporary uses of geographical metaphors and caution against an excessive emphasis on displacement as a metaphor for a critical feminist stance. We argue that geographies of placement must be held in tension with an ideal of displacement. We develop this point through a case study of women and work in contemporary Worcester, Massachusetts. Women in Worcester are very much rooted in place and this is a vehicle for the construction of differences across women. We argue that studies of the construction of feminine identities in particular places counteract the current tendency within feminism to rigidify differences among women a...

Gender and Urban Activity Patterns in Uppsala, Sweden

G EOGRAPHERS, sociologists, planners, and other persons concerned with the quality of urban life have studied daily travel behavior and activity patterns of urban residents for more than a decade. The different ways in which persons use an urban environment have been studied as an indication of the level of the richness enjoyed, or deprivation endured, by members of various social groups.1 Contemporary urban space with activities allocated to different, discrete locations puts a premium on mobility. An approach toward understanding travel behavior is to identify a factor believed to be important in shaping observed spatial behavior and then to use this factor as the basis for comparison of group-travel patterns. Geographers have examined various aspects of group-travel behavior.2 Relatively little, however, has been done to assess the impact of social roles on travel behavior observed in an urban setting. The purpose of this article is to examine the ways in which gender-related roles affect daily travel-activity patterns of individuals. Here we compare the travel-activity patterns of men and women who are employed full-time. We focus on employed persons for a number of reasons. First, comparable employment status is necessary because work outside the home is a major constraint on the way in which individuals allocate time to various activities at different locations. Second, the number of women in the labor force has increased. The behavior patterns of employed women should be examined because the working woman is becoming more typical than the nonworking woman.3 Third, in the context of the current debate over whether or not traditional sex roles are eroded when women gain economic independence through employment, the influence of traditional sex roles on spatial behavior when both men and women share the same constraints from full-time employment outside the home needs to be analyzed.4

SYSTEMATIC VARIABILITY IN REPETITIOUS TRAVEL

AbstractThe focus of this paper is the degree to which day-to-day variability in the individuals travel pattern has a systematic, or nonrandom, component. We first review the different sources of variability in travel, emphasizing the difference between between-individual and within-individual variation and the implications of this difference for travel analysis. After discussing the impact of measurement (i.e. the way in which travel behavior is measured) on the study of repetition and variability, we use the Uppsala data to examine the level of systematic variability in an individuals longitudinal travel record. The analysis focuses on two questions:- How well does observation over one week capture longer-term (five-week) travel behavior; in other words, is behavior highly repetitive from week to week?- How systematic is within-individual variability; in other words, are certain stops distributed over the five-week record in a nonrandom, that is either regular or clustered, fashion? Using measures of travel that include more than one stop attribute (e.g. activity, mode, time of day, and location), we found that:- A seven-day record of travel does not capture most of the separate behaviors exhibited by the individual over a five-week period, but it does capture, for most people, a good sampling of the persons different typical daily travel patterns.- Whereas a considerable portion of intraindividual variability is systematic (nonrandom), clustering is a more important source of nonrandom variation than is regularity. The results suggest that behavior does not follow a weekly cycle closely enough for a one-week travel record to measure the longer-term frequency with which the individual makes certain stops or to assess the level of day-to-day variation present in the individuals record. Because these results are likely to reflect the particular measures of behavior we used, one conclusion of this study is the need for other studies that replicate the aims of this one but use a variety of other travel measures. Only through such additional work can we truly assess the sensitivity of our findings to measurement techniques.