Boots are made for walking: interactions across physical and social space in infrastructure-poor regions (original) (raw)
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Transportation and social interactions
Transportation Research Part A-policy and Practice, 2011
The topic of social interaction, and its relationships to travel and transportation, is rapidly gaining interest in the transportation community. Going beyond the study of intra-household interactions, a more general view of social contact is sought that can help to explain the motivation for, and characteristics of, travel behavior. The study of inter-household interactions, as well as interpersonal interaction in settings other than the household, represents a promising way to improve our understanding of different aspects of travel behavior, including modal choice, work and non-work travel, the decision to telework, the planning and execution of activities, and locational decisions. The papers in this special issue represent a selection of research presented at the international workshop Frontiers in Transportation II: Social Interactions, held October 13-16, 2007 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. 1 This activity, endorsed by the Transportation Research Board, Committee on Transportation Demand Forecasting, Subcommittee on Emerging Methods was planned as a continuation of a first meeting in July 2-5, 2005, that brought together a group of transportation researchers interested in the topic of social and spatial interactions. The follow up workshop aimed at capitalizing on the momentum generated by the previous activity (see Dugundji et al., 2008), and, as part of this, to refine, expand, and further explore what we believe is one of the most intriguing research themes to emerge in the past 5 years in transportation research, namely the confluence/convergence of ideas in geography, travel behavior research, and sociology. Being at a research frontier that increasingly pays attention to the social context within which travel takes place, there are numerous outstanding challenges associated with this agenda, including the role of simulation studies, the need for empirical research documenting the effect of social contact on travel, data collection protocols, and methodological and analytical issues. The workshop was organized around eight thematic panels on the topics: simulation studies, challenges of large scale systems, econometric approaches, innovative data collection, social context, qualitative methods, aggregate influences, and the role of information in planning practice. An interdisciplinary opening panel set the tone for the workshop touching on main themes, featuring presentations by Kathleen Carley,
Network traffic locality in a rural African village
ICTD March 2012, Atlanta, Georgia USA
The Internet is evolving from a system of connections between humans and machines to a new paradigm of social connection. However, it is still dominated by a hub and spoke architecture with inter-connectivity between users typically requiring connections to a common server on the Internet. This creates a large amount of traffic that must traverse an Internet gateway, even when users communicate with each other in a local network. Nowhere is this inefficiency more pronounced than in rural areas with low-bandwidth connectivity to the Internet. Our previous work in a rural village in Macha, Zambia showed that web traffic, and social networking in particular, are dominant services. In this paper we use a recent network trace, from this same village, to explore the degree of local user-to-user interaction in the village. Extraction of a social graph, using instant message interactions on Facebook, reveals that 54% of the messages are between local users. Traffic analysis highlights that the potential spare capacity of the local network is not utilized for direct local communication between users even though indirect communication between local users is routed through services on the Internet. These findings build a strong motivation for a new rural network architecture that places services that enable user-to-user interaction and file sharing in the village.
Living in a Walking World: Rural Mobility and Social Equity Issues in Sub-Saharan Africa
World Development, 2002
Accessibility and mobility are embedded in the development nexus in far-reaching ways. Field studies of mobility among women and men in rural settlements with poor road access illustrate the frustrations and costs of living off-road. They are frequently marginalized and invisible, even to local administrations. State decentralization appears to have had little positive impact in reducing ''tarmac bias'' and improving rural service delivery. A range of potential interventions, from Intermediate Means of Transport to electronic communications is reviewed, and opportunities for building social capital in off-road areas through nurturing improvements in state-civil society relations are considered.
Bulletin of Geography. Socio-economic Series
Mobility plays a crucial role in joining activity's locations to each other, enabling social contact, and facilitating the movement of people and goods from and to various locations. This study investigates the mobility characteristics of peri-urban communities in selected cities of Southwest Nigeria. We selected 505 respondents from the 11 peri-urban communities for the questionnaire survey using a stratified sampling technique. The data were summarised using frequency, mean and mode while ANOVA and Chi-square were used to test for the significant difference in inter-community and gender variations in mobility variables. Findings revealed a substantial variation in the distance separating the peri-urban communities and the city centres. Most of the respondents (81.4%) indicated that the roads in their communities were not paved, with adverse effects on their mobility. The peri-urban communities are served by informal transit modes, with more than 33% of the respondents relying ...
Human mobility in advanced and developing economies: A comparative analysis
2010
The deployment of ubiquitous computing technologies in the real-world has enabled the capture of large-scale quantitative data related to human behavior, including geographical information. This type of data creates an opportunity to characterize human mobility, with potential applications ranging from modeling the spread of viruses to transportation planning. This paper presents an initial study focused on understanding the similarities and differences in mobility patterns across countries with different economic levels. In particular, we analyze and compare human mobility in a developing and an advanced economy 1 by means of their cell phone traces. We characterize mobility in terms of (1) average distance traveled, (2) area of influence of each individual, and (3) geographic sparsity of the social network. Our results indicate that there are statistically significant differences in human mobility across countries with different economic levels. Specifically, individuals in the developing economy show smaller mobility and smaller geographical sparsity of their social network when compared to individuals in the advanced economy.
Personal networks and urban poverty: preliminary findings
Brazilian Political Science Review (online), 2008
This article presents results of ongoing research into personal networks in São Paulo, exploring their relationships with poverty and urban segregation. We present the results of networks of 89 poor individuals who live in 3 different segregation situations in the city. The article starts by describing and analysing the main characteristics of personal networks of sociability, highlighting aspects such as their size, cohesion and diversity, among others.
Social Distance: An Anthropological Perspective
https://medium.com/@fdcring/social-distance-an-anthropological-perspective-f8d3df24801a, 2020
With the current pandemic of Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) there has been a lot of discussion about Social Distancing in order to slow the transmission rate between people. And in fact this particular virus may have originated from humans being in close contact with animals like bats or the Pangolin (zoonoses). These viral diseases including the common coronaviruses (alpha coronaviruses) are known as Density Dependent Diseases (DDD). We're being advised to avoid crowds, but nobody (to the best of our knowledge) is advising us to avoid "making" crowds. We need to "think outside the pyramid" and recognize the singular most important problem facing humankind-the common dominator is global human overpopulation.
The bridging and bonding structures of place-centric networks: Evidence from a developing country
PLOS ONE, 2019
Social capital has long been associated with opportunities of access to valuable resources that individuals, groups, communities, and places can extract from the social structure emerging from their interactions. Despite the overall consensus on the structural signature of social capital, there is still controversy over the relative benefits associated with different types of social structure. In this article, we advocate a two-faceted perspective on social capital, regarded as value originating from both closed (rich in third-party relationships) and open (rich in brokerage opportunities) bridging structures. We uncover these structures from place-centric networks and investigate their association with key socioeconomic indicators. To this end, we draw on aggregated mobile phone usage data, and construct the place-centric communication and mobility networks in the city of Abidjan in Cô te d'Ivoire. We begin by defining appropriate network metrics to capture the interplay between bonding and bridging social structures in each of the 10 districts (communes) in Abidjan. We then examine the correlation between these metrics and a number of district-level socioeconomic indicators related to economic prosperity, wealth, security and democratic participation. Our findings suggest that both closed and open structures can serve as wellsprings of social capital: while closed bonding structures are associated with higher economic prosperity, open bridging structures are associated with increased democratic participation and security. By uncovering sources of social capital from communication and mobility placecentric networks in a developing country, our work contributes to a better understanding of how these networks could be used to enhance and sustain socioeconomic growth and prosperity, and ultimately paves the way towards a broader comparative study of social capital in developed and developing countries.