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Emergent Spatio-temporal Dimensions of the City pp 131–187Cite as

Structuring Time

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Abstract

This chapter focuses on the aspects of the temporal by bringing together both data sets from the fieldwork under the aspect of clock time but also experienced time. Both the individual and the collective as well as cultural aspects of time and time conception are discussed. Here the processing and visualisation of the data with a focus on the impact on morphology with respect to sets of flows are included. The different data sets, interviews, mental maps and tracking will be discussed in relation to the individual level. The NCL work focuses on the collective level. As a second stage, the individual and collective part are related and a synthesis is generated. The main focus will be on the relationship between activity and temporal patterns.

Overall this chapter extends the time aspects of the literature review and critical discussion of the results in the context of the presented theories. A specific focus here is on the time geography concepts and anthropology discussing the value and applicability of habitus, constraints and path, to name a few.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See ISO/TC154 (2004) for accuracy of time measurement.

  2. 2.

    Known in Babylon and in Egypt around the sixteenth century BC, but also in China and India around 400 BC (Cowan 1958).

  3. 3.

    The terms used here might appear confusing; however anthropological research used time terms in this fashion in the early twentieth century.

  4. 4.

    The frequency of location recordings affects the three aspects of spatial accuracy, battery life and storage capacity. Whilst a high level of accuracy is desirable, this will fill up the local storage as well as drain the battery quicker. The chosen trade-off of 7 s allows for a battery life of around 24 h and the internal memory to hold data for about 3 weeks worth of recordings.

  5. 5.

    See colour key for each day of the week in Fig. 6.4.

  6. 6.

    BST stands for British Summer Time and GMT is Greenwich Mean Time. Whilst GMT is essentially UTC during summer, the UK observes summer time which is 1 h ahead of UTC. Similarly in Basel the CEST stands for Central European Summer Time which is 1 h ahead of the Central European Time (CET, observed during winter). This is outlined in one of the standards set out by the International Organization for Standardization ISO in the document ISO 6801:2004 (ISO/TC154 2004).

  7. 7.

    In 2010 Twitter donated the entire archive of tweets, since the beginning of 2006, to the Library of Congress. It was jointly announced on the Library of Congress Blog (Raymond 2010) and the official Twitter Blog (Biz 2010).

  8. 8.

    The deal was announced in October 2009 at the Web 2.0 Summit. The ruling contract for Google to access the Twitter archive expired on 2 July 2011 according to Barnett (2011).

  9. 9.

    By the end of 2011 (December), a report on the blog The Big Picture (Ritholtz 2011) shows that Twitter receives about 98,000 messages a minute. This is staggering 1,650 messages per second.

  10. 10.

    For a detailed discussion of the diagram, see, for example, an animated version of the diagram on http://dd.dynamicdiagrams.com/2008/01/nightingales-rose/ [accessed on 2011-08-30], or the documentation on the BBC at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00chk4w with the title Florence Nightingale’s Rose Diagram as shown on BBC Four [accessed on 2011-08-30].

  11. 11.

    It has to be mentioned that some of these social tags are put into the Twitter stream through service providers. For example, the #nowplaying tag is put in by music streaming sites to promote the service through the consumer’s personal social network. Nevertheless, it still reflects the activity pattern of users. It describes what they were doing since the automatic tags are based on usage.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London, London, Cardiganshire, UK

    Fabian Neuhaus

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  1. Fabian Neuhaus
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Neuhaus, F. (2015). Structuring Time. In: Emergent Spatio-temporal Dimensions of the City. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09849-4_6

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