Space-adjusting technologies and the social ecologies of place: review and research agenda

Abstract

This paper reviews research on how new forms of transportation and information and communication technology (ICT) facilitate changes in daily individual activity patterns and, as a result, the social ecologies of urban environments. Prior attempts to map and describe the space–time social ecologies of place are based on activity diaries for representative samples of urban residents. Geo-referencing information and location technologies embedded within ICT are seen as increasingly central to transformations in urban social ecologies, affording new forms of human activity behavior. Incorporation of geo-enabled ICT provides a research agenda for geographical information science (GIS) to develop concepts and tools for documenting and mapping indicators of the ongoing reorganization in the space–time social ecologies of cities and regions for purposes of exploratory research, diagnostic use, and policy evaluation.

Keywords:

• human extensibility
• social ecology
• space-adjusting technologies
• synoptic mapping
• time geography

Acknowledgments

The author thanks the editors and anonymous reviewers for their insightful observations and suggestions. Prior collaboration with Helen Couclelis, Michael Goodchild, Harvey Miller, and Val Noronha informed many of the ideas in this paper.