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REBALANCE Talk with Massimo Moraglio
No full textIn this Rebalance Talk, Andreu Ulied spoke with professor Massimo Moraglio – on the growing relevance of mobility’s dark side
In the past decade the dark side of mobility has driven been more attention in the academic discussion (Cohen and Gössling 2015) as well as in the public domain discussion (as for “fly shaming”). Massimo Moraglio states that this weak signal is a sign of a (bigger) cultural shift, which defines mobility (also) as a burden, with negative impacts on social life as well as on the environment. In this respect, we are witnessing not only a new trend, but a major change in what is mobility in Europe.
The hegemonic idea of mobility has been based on traveling as an empowering element of modernity, able to open up markets, opportunities and new discoveries.
Goethe´s Grand Tour was the seminal moment of this idea of mobility, reinforced in the next decades, by new, formidable transport regimes and systems. Goethe himself traveled very slowly, and paved the way for the democratization of mobility, which granted – more recently – millions of Europeans to built new way of thinking, moving and living.
Not all of us can have the luxury of slow trip, as Goethe. Actually, in the past two centuries speed has become not an annoyance (if I rush it is because I have not time to take it easy), but a status symbol, ranking those travelling fast as the happy few. Easy access to fast and exotic destinations reinforced the idea of mobility as an asset, as stated in the mobility discourse.
This faster mobility, now available for masses, has a bright side, letting millions of European to travel. But, it has more recently also triggered new travel attitudes, as slow mobility, while Covid pandemic has made evident also the value of immobility (and how immobility is unevenly distributed).
The attention now given to the dark side of mobility (mobility is fatigue, is boring, is energy consumer, is polluting) is, in his eyes, a weak signal capable to become a major cultural shift, which is already having huge impact on policymakers´ and industry’s long-term decisions.
A new generation of European have experiences easy, cheap and easy to manage mobility services, which made them mobility saturated, thus less prone to consider mobility as an achievement, but an asset to be assessed in its pros and cons. This has been correlated with the impact of mobility in the CO2 emission, growing both in its share and in its absolute number.
Massimo Moraglio plea is to consider – then – mobility in its duality, both as an asset which offers more knowledge, opportunities and widen horizons, but also as a burden, as an effort. Therefore, we should leave an apriorist idea of mobility as “good” and immobility as “bad”, but facing its dichotomy (As much as re-consider slowness and speed!). Actually, the growing attention to the difficulty of travelling can fuel a discuss about the impact of transport on the climate crisis.
He therefore urges to pay more attention to what is potentially becoming a disruptive element of tomorrow’s cultural mobility mindset, even more so in younger European generations. A deeper discussion must be triggered both in academia and in policymaker’s milieus, so to gain a better understanding of present trends and their future impacts
Recensions
No full textObra ressenyada: Rafael GRASA; Andreu ULIED (eds.), Medi ambient i governabilitat a la Mediterrània. Barcelona: Proa, 1997
Recensions
No full textObra ressenyada: Rafael GRASA; Andreu ULIED (eds.), Medi ambient i governabilitat a la Mediterrània. Barcelona: Proa, 1997
Greener transport choices
No full text<p><em><strong>In the third Rebalance Dialogue, <a href="https://rebalancemobility.eu/andrea-ricci/">Andrea Ricci</a> talked with <a href="https://rebalancemobility.eu/andreu-ulied/">Andreu Ulied</a> and <a href="https://rebalancemobility.eu/robert-braun/">Robert Braun </a>about signs towards greener transport choices. In Europe, these signs are emerging. Industry is making cleaner vehicles increasingly available and performant (electromobility, cleaner fuels). Government plays an important role through standards, taxation, phasing out, but also, at the local level, through the redesign of urban, greener spaces and infrastructure.</strong></em></p>
<p>Therefore the question is whether these moves are primarily pushed forward by a changing societal attitude towards environmental protection and the pursuance of a healthier life. If not, how effective would be a green mobility transition without a major shift in the attitude of citizens and mobility users?</p>
<p>Grassroots initiatives, like “Fridays for Future”, play an important role in raising environmental and health concerns, which in turn could foster modal shifts. To what extent are people driven by knowledge and evidence on the social and environmental benefits of green choices, or is it rather the urge to fulfil social norms that drives them – this will be revealed in the near future. Moreover, the success of such initiatives might also contribute to underline intergenerational differences in awareness and motivation.</p>
<p>If we can imagine a new mobility culture based on structural changes, we should ask ourselves whether demand-side policies today in place – such as access regulations, infrastructure charging, standards – will be no longer necessary.</p>
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<p><strong>The shift towards “active travel” is a major component of the green transition.</strong></p>
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<p>Active travel is usually defined as travel that requires physical activity (walking, cycling etc.), generating social benefits in both environmental and health terms. REBALANCE aims to comprehend the depth of the changes in values and attitudes that are required to enact a visible move to active travel. This dialogue tried to understand inequalities and how they relate to active travel. While active mobility is great for upper-middle-class men, it might not so much for the majority. It also brings a lot of externalities. However, the participants stressed the importance of walking for socialisation.</p>
<p>According to the discussants, industry pushes towards allegedly sustainable modes that are nothing new. Transition to electricity is being forced by coercion, not by awareness. Consequently, mobility systems have an immense resilience and capability of incorporating critique. An additional concerned was flagged on short-haul and city aerial mobility, which will become a major problem in the future.</p>
<p>Gender issues were also addressed during the conversation to understand if gender is a meaningful variable in the transition to greener mobility. If so, does this have to do with gender-specific value differences? Women have been proposed as indicator of transport service quality. The discussants also think that transport and public spaces should be evaluated through women’s involvement and the services provided.</p>
<p>A contemporary debate cannot omit the influence of COVID-19 on mobility and the plausibility that it yields structural behavioural changes, a “new normal” where substantial modal shifts become permanent, though the participants think that the new normal will be very similar to the old normal.</p>
<p>The role of technology is always present; and our discussants agreed that remote technologies impact socialisation, creativity and new projects. Furthermore, we are not in control when entangled with different technologies.</p>
<p>Regarding governance, the debate focused on how regime change is necessary to change the ‘details’ (environment, mobility…). New regimes need to be less based on command-control and more based on collaboration moral economy. Top-down approaches are the enemy because they reflect a totalitarian paradigm. To fight these, a transition organised with the people (from legal norms to social norms) was proposed.</p>
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<p><strong>Paradigm change is extremely slow. Inequalities are hidden by the environmental imaginary.</strong></p>
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<p>New technologies do not solve all problems and they can create new ones. For instance, we might build clean, circular, sustainable suburbs where people are disconnected and live alone. The conclusion is that there is no culture-nature divide and we must reconceptualise the world around us. Value choices are more important than technology when changing mobility modes.</p>
REBALANCE Talk with Noel B.Salazar
No full textIn this Rebalance Talk, Andreu Ulied spoke with anthropologist Noel Salazar – known for his research in the anthropologies of mobility and travel, the local-to-global nexus, and discourses and imaginaries of Otherness– on immobility and the structures that facilitate movement and impede others.
Today, the word “mobility” entails so much more than mere physical motion. When Salazar asked his first classes what mobility meant to them, they answered saying there is a positive association and emphasized mobility’s connection to change. They also pointed out the linkage to freedom, people are able to move quite easily. As a broad definition, mobility is how we make movements meaningful.
Salazar attempts to show the scope of the mobility as a concept, “it captures the common impression that our lifeworld is in flux, with not only people, but also cultures, objects, capital, businesses, services, diseases, media, images, information, and ideas circulating across (and even beyond) the planet.”
When we are transported, we are moved around passively by a car, plane, or bus. Many of us tend to “check-out”, burying ourselves in our screens and books. While transportation has many benefits like saving energy, time, and creating comfort – we lose self-propelled movement. Salazar states that we need this motion, “the act of being in motion is important in regards to living things, therefore transportation isn’t very natural.” The COVID19 pandemic helped to further reveal the difference between being moved and doing the moving. The self-propelled movement and the bodily activity in moving around is incredibly important to us. In urban areas, when infrastructure allows, they are making efforts to go back to biking, walking, and other active forms of movements. This active movement exists in leisure and is being incorporated into commutes like in Copenhagen, where 62% of inhabitants’ trips to work or school are by bike. This increase in cycling is thanks to the city’s bicycle infrastructure investment, which breaks down to more than €40 invested per capita.
In this talk Salazar explores the idea of pace and the feeling of disconnect, which is ironic in an age where we have incredible transportation and communication networks. He states that disconnect comes from the idea that the environment is something that is around rather than something we are a part of, it’s the “thinking processes that see humans as something different”.
However, indigenous cultures have had a different world view, one that believes the human is a part of something that is much bigger. It’s not about competition but rather collaboration, and nature only thrives when it collaborates. This seen in basic biology, networks of trees in the rainforest can only thrive on fungi networks. Our western culture is “catching up” to the natural collaboration that has always been around us; Salazar emphasizes the importance of doing so, “Entire relational fields—‘worlds’—are always in motion and subject to reconfigurations. Investigating multi-scalar mobilities is thus central to understanding the complexities of the current global condition.”
When asked about justices and injustices of mobility in terms of belonging and becoming, Salazar reacts against much of the ideology that is behind a lot of mobility thinking, “The problem is mobility is not accessible to everyone. It’s not that everyone wants to be mobile all the time, but many mobilities, like migration, are out of necessity”. Freedom is the choice to be immobile or mobile. The people who have most control of when they want to move and how they want to move are expressing this freedom. However, many people do not have that option and even those who do experience inequalities when moving. What determines these inequalities? Many parameters in society like social class, nationality, religion, gender, etc. We must realize that labels are not mutual, the terms “mobile EU citizen” and “migrant” have two very different connotations. Labels enhance injustices and continue to show privilege. We need to be aware how we label and how we name things because labels are limiting
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
REBALANCE Talk with Marta C. González
No full textIn this Rebalance Talk, Andreu Ulied spoke with professor Marta González – known for her work in transport modelling and an expert in developing computer models – on models based on actual current data known as “Nowcasting”, this new generation of models focus on what people actually do, not on people values or preferences in order to identify and manage the demand in urban infrastructures in relation to energy and mobility.
The evolution of technology over the past decades has given rise to ubiquitous mobile computing. There are 5.31 billion unique mobile phone users in the world today. Even in developing countries, penetration rates are of 83% and growing fast. Mobile phone devices and the applications that run on them passively record information on location with high spatial and temporal resolution. Cellular antennas, wifi access points, and GPS receivers are used to measure the geographic position of users to within a few hundred meters or less.
While the collection, storage, and analysis of mobile data presents very real and important privacy concerns, it also offers an unprecedented opportunity for researchers to quantify human behavior at large-scale. With billions of data points captured on millions of users each day, new research into mobility science has begun to augment and sometimes replace sparse, traditional data sources, helping to answer old questions and raise new.
The approach Dr. González uses to mode mobility is to understand the underlying patterns of individuals using new high resolution data. It ties together the inference of home and work activity locations from data, with the modeling of flexible activities (e.g., other) in space and time. The temporal choices are captured by three parameters: the weekly home-based tour number, the dwell rate, and an exploration rate. Individual parameters are extracted from the data to capture how an individual deviates from the circadian rhythm of the population, and generate the wide spectrum of empirically observed mobility behaviors.
The spatial choices of visited locations are modeled by a rank-based exploration and preferential return mechanism. Meaning that each location’s choice can be labeled either as a return to previous locations or as an exploration (a visit to a location never visited before). For the returns, the probability to select a location is proportional to the number of visits it already has, also known as the “rich get richer effect”. This effect generates a Zipf’s law in the frequency of visits, which is a ubiquitous observation in human mobility data.
Her research team have uncovered `mobility motifs’ by examining abstract trip chains over the course of a day. A daily mobility motif is defined a set of locations and a particular order that a person visits them over the course of a day. These motifs constitute directed networks where nodes are locations and edges are trips from one location to another. For example, the motif of an individual whose only trips in a day are to and from work will consist of two nodes with a two directed edges (one in both directions). Counting motifs in mobility data from mobile phones and traditional travel surveys, we find on average individuals visit 3 different places in a given day. We then construct all possible daily motifs for a given number of locations (n) and compute the frequencies that those motifs appear in human mobility data.
Shockingly, while there exist over 1 million ways for a user to travel between n=6 or fewer locations, 90% of people use one of just 17 motifs and nearly a quarter follow the simple two location commute motif. Her team have found the same results both in travel survey data, mobile phones and their model which reproduces empirical results.
To measure each individual’s hinterland, or area of influence, she borrowed a quantity from polymer physics known as the “radius of gyration”. For each individual, it measures the average distance to her mean location (e.g. her center of mass). In essence, the radius of gyration is a measurement of the characteristic distance an individual travels during an observation period. When analyzing data from cities of diverse latitudes and GDPs, they share the distribution of radius of gyration of their population. It is approximated by a truncated power-law. Interestingly, even when analyzing mobile phone records from Saudi Arabia, where women do not have access to drivers licenses, the distributions of the radius of gyration of men and women do not present significant differences.
González’ modeling framework is based on revealed data, not in stated preferences. She develops mathematical models predicting people behavior without any assumption on people values or wishes. These collection of universal patterns in space and time is what we called individual mobility patterns.
She combines mobile phone data with other sources of information and much richer possibilities for discovery emerge. Her team have a study, that uncovers various spending and mobility habits combined. It uses digital traces left by credit cards and mobile phone data in Mexico City. By grouping consumers by their similarity in purchase sequences, we detect five groups or “lifestyles”. Purchase habits are not only related to socio-demographic characteristics such as age, gender, income and mobility – they are also related to the places people visit, and the people they call. Each of these groups has a core purchase, which is the most frequent of their spending activities. The groups were labeled as: “home makers”, “dinners”, “high tech users”, “youth” and “commuters”.
In the years to come Marta is combining these approaches to uncover pattern of humans and natural systems interactions. To mitigate the current trends of our global
environmental footprint, we need to better understand the sources of greenhouse gas emissions and develop more science-based policies. There’s a disconnect between “ubiquitous computing” and the best practices proposed by those studying environmental sciences, urban planning and public policy. Improving this connection is her current research goal
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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