Urban Mobility and Activity Space

Abstract

Recent theoretical and methodological advances in urban sociology, including spatially located data, provide new opportunities to consider the joint influence of mobility and place in urban social life. This review defines the concept of activity space, describes its origins in urban sociology, and examines the extent to which activity space approaches advance sociological research in four substantive domains—spatial inequality and segregation, social connectedness and engagement, crime and offending patterns, and health and health-related behavior. It next describes the evolution of methods for location tracking and new approaches that hold promise for maximizing urban mobility and activity space contributions. It then discusses how location data may be augmented to enhance our sociological understanding of the structure, meaning, and implications of the places people visit or traverse in daily life. We close with new directions for activity space research, emphasizing how such work could enable comparative contextual research.