CopyLeft 2013 Elvin K. Wyly
Except where otherwise noted, this site is
My office is Room 252 in the Geography Building. Look for the photocopy room on the Second Floor, and then wind your way down the corridor next to it until you find images and maps of cities.
Ah, January of 2013! My office hours this term: Monday mornings, as early as I can get into the office, until around noon. I'll try to get in around 8, perhaps even earlier, most days. Stop by for a chat!
If you can't make Monday mornings, or if you're at my office door and you can't find me, then try calling 778 899 7906.
On the days I venture to the University, below is my Daily Hägerstrand. Maybe we should call it the Elvinstrand. Track me down for Mobile Office Hours®™, or this might help you in planning to maximize the likelihood of a Hagerstrand-style intersection in our daily schedules. [This is my pathetic substitute for FourSquare™ or Twitter® or iWhatevertheyCallitNow™ and similar Web stuff. Sheesh, this neoLuddite© needs an intervention, doesn't he?]
If you don't understand the Hägerstrand references, then here's what you need to remember: he became famous for "time geography," which emphasized the fundamental importance of space and time together, and the significant role of very localized facets of the environment in shaping individual experiences and perceptions. Time-geography was deeply influential for a number of years, especially in the field of behavioral geography; its most common graphical expression was as a three-dimensional graph showing individuals' routine daily movements and activities: think of a fish-tank where the goldfish's path traces out a map from home to work over time. I never met Torsten Hagerstrand, but I was inspired by his work from my first days in undergraduate study in geography. Roger Downs and Peter Gould worked in the behavioral tradition, and I took classes from them. Roger Miller did his doctoral dissertation applying time-geography to gender relations in the urban environment, and Roger was on my graduate committee at Minnesota. See
Roger Miller (1982). "Household Activity Patterns in Nineteenth-Century Suburbs: A Time-Geographic Exploration." Annals of the Association of American Geographers 72(3), 355-371.
The daily path is just one of many variations on a theme. You can imagine time-space graphs, and narratives, for weekly, monthly, seasonal/annual, or stage-of-life-course regularities. Or you can trace the spatial-temporal path of formative experiences over your entire career, making all sorts of sampling decisions on what to include and what to exclude. So see, for example, Peter Gould's approach in the seminar:
"One of the tried-and-true readings given quite early that first semester was Torsten Hagerstrand's delightful autobiographical essay that not only looked back to reflect on the sources of his own extraordinary geographic thinking, but that structured, over a vertical axis of time, the events, books, places, and people that had informed his professional life."
Peter Gould (2000). Becoming a Geographer. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, p. 2.
