Urban Tempo and Structure

Abstract

The goods and services chosen by the households determine how large their ­environmental impact is. These choices are made within more or less coercive ­settings and restrictions. It is therefore possible to say that environmental impact of the urban households depends both on the choices they can make and those they actually make within these limitations. The urban physical structures or, if you will, the urban space comprising the organizational localization pattern and spread together with available transport means join to form the physical setting in which urban residents live their lives. On the whole this complex has decisive importance to the choices that can be made, while of course each urban structure offers very varied operational repertoire between different households. Even the city’s temporal structure is very important, defined for this purpose as both the tempo and the ­distribution between different social processes and activities over the 24 h of a day. This then is the institutional setting in which urban residents live and which works with the physical setting to provide wide variations between the individual choices.