Beyond Space (As We Knew It): Toward Temporally Integrated Geographies of Segregation, Health, and Accessibility - Space-Time Integration in Geography and GIScience - page 45

can lead to distorted demand patterns and facility location that is far from the best
for clients. Studies like these have shown that ignoring time and human mobility in
accessibility research can often obfuscate what people actually experience in their
everyday lives and lead to erroneous conclusions. Because people with different
attributes (e.g., gender, race, sexual orientation, age, and disability) face different
space-time constraints, the effects of the same physical environment on accessibility,
even for individuals who live at the same physical location (e.g., members of the
same household), can be very different. Conceptualizing accessibility as space-time
feasibility will thus have significant implications for our understanding of many
important social issues.

4.5 Toward Temporally Integrated Geographies

This article argued that critical insight can be gained when commonly used spatial
concepts of segregation, environmental exposure, and accessibility take time and
human mobility into account. Temporally integrated human geographies have
considerable potential for shedding new light on many important issues geographers
and social scientists have examined for decades. The article, however, did not argue
that space is no longer important. It aimed mainly to expand our analytical focus
from static residential spaces to other relevant places and times in people's everyday
lives: where and when people work, eat, play, shop, and socialize. Mobility is
an essential element of people's spatiotemporal experiences, and these complex
experiences cannot be fully understood by just looking at where people live.
While this article treated segregation, environmental exposure, and accessibility
as separate notions, they are nonetheless analytically interlinked. They all focus
on where and when individuals come into contact with or under the influence of
other people or social/physical conditions (e.g., environmental risk factors or social
opportunities) as their daily lives unfold. The places people can reach and at what
time they can reach them (individual accessibility) are important determinants of
their exposures to various social or environmental influences (Gulliver and Briggs
2005 ;Kwan 2012b ). Racial or ethnic segregation not only may limit people's
access to jobs and social facilities but also can expose them to higher levels of
environmental risk (Chakraborty 2012 ; Grady and Darden 2012 ). There are some
recent attempts to bridge these three notions and to develop new hybrid analytical
constructs. For instance, Wong and Shaw ( 2011 ), Farber et al. ( 2012 ), and Palmer
et al. ( 2013 ) conceptualize racial segregation as exposure to different racial groups
via people's daily activity spaces. Exploring the analytical links among segregation,
environmental exposure, and accessibility through some unifying notions seems a
fruitful direction for the future development of temporally integrated geographies.
As many social scientists are also interested in studying these three themes, inter-
disciplinary research along this line may have a broad impact on many disciplines
beyond geography.