Reviews for Activity-based Approaches to Travel Analysis

The average rating for Activity-based Approaches to Travel Analysis based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-01-29 00:00:00 Mark Wallring I wish I'd had access to this book when I was writing my undergraduate dissertation, seven years ago. It has very interesting things to say about utopianism within planning and the model industrial town movement, which was my dissertation topic. Better late than never, though. 'Sphinx in the City' is a wide-ranging and accessibly written study of women's place in the city over time and in different countries. Of particular note, it conveys an intersectional feminism. Women are not considered to be an undifferentiated mass, rather the differing experiences between, for example, rich, middle class, and poverty-stricken women are compared. Moreover, a chapter is devoted to the cities of the developing world, the legacy that colonialism has left them, and how their urbanisation differs from that of the Western world. I enjoyed the fact that this study drew from diverse, interdisciplinary sources. I would tend to situate it within the discipline of planning, but planning itself has ever been a battleground or site of co-operation between architecture, economics, history, geography, ecology, politics, and anthropology. It certainly borrows theory and practise from all those disciplines and others. The tone of the book is perhaps most akin to cultural history, however. Novels, poetry, and reportage are all quoted. I particularly liked the pair of chapters that compared London and Paris in the 19th century. The description of Paris fitted well with other accounts I've come across, such as Paris Babylon: The Story of the Paris Commune. Although this book was written in 1991, I think the critique in the final chapter is still very relevant. As Wilson predicted, the redevelopments of King's Cross and the Docklands in London have displaced poorer people and, in my view, created a bland, corporate, heavily controlled and surveyed built environment. Although Wilson doesn't claim to know the answers to the current structural challenges to the liveability of cities, she does provide a thoughtful and incisive analysis. Which is a lot more useful than a lot of planning literature that descends into a the tedious and oversimplistic markets vs public intervention debate. Wilson acknowledges that the two 'sides' are in fact interdependent and can both be autocratic. For the city to become a friendlier place for all women (and indeed men), inequalities that go beyond the remit of planning need to be addressed.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-12-30 00:00:00 James Weinrich Wilson argues through case studies of individual or related cities, argues that cities were deeply bound as symbolically female, with temptations, vice, and pockets of pleasure, which, in the 19th - 20th century, men sought to regulate, control, temper, and remake for the perceived safety of women. Women in cities were at once seen as temptress prostitutes, lesbians, and fallen heroines, or virtuous women in danger who successfully triumphed over temptation. As cities ballooned, the working class and minorities were depicted as metaphoric women, hysterical, prone to emotion, and could not be trusted to be in charge of their own lives. Wilson argued against feminist discourse that said that cities are naturally bad for women, instead arguing that cities historically were shaped by women and men planned them instead to control the femaleness of cities, especially in the false nuclear family structure. Henceforth, city controllers worked to exclude women in both decision making process and visibility, for their perceived own protection. She breaks down the book looking at historic cities. After introducing her argument, in chapter two, she looks to the ancient to medieval cities histories, until the 19th century. In chapter three, she looks to London, the first industrial city where zoning separated people from workplaces in order to reform behavior. Chapter four moves to Paris, described as a decidedly female charactered city, a floating world. Chapter five moves to the American Dream anti-urban impulses, with the depiction of both Chicago and New York as the babylons, even as both experienced their so-called golden ages. Chapter six moves back to Europe, looking to Central European cities such as Vienna and Berlin, in both the socialist activist, thriving democratic impulses, and finally terrifyingly orderly fascist realities, in which Hitler made architecture among his top priorities. Chapter seven returns to ideas of cities, from garden cities to the city beautiful movement, both founded upon anti-urban impulses to control the worst aspects of cities, according to male planners. Chapter eight refreshingly moves to cities in the third world, noting at the beginning that there are sharp differences between cities of Latin America and Africa and that the temptation of lumping all into one category is not useful. For instance, Latin American cities were shaped by industrialization while African cities mostly were shaped by the colonial experience, and African cities mostly have family bonds extending to the rural countryside while Latin American cities more typically fall into the separation between the two. Chapter nine wraps the book by looking at how postmodern impulses have blurred the lines between country and city, structural changes to the perceived nuclear family have again put women into central roles of cities, and defended spaces are largely breaking down. Wilson argues strongly for moving past the good city, bad city duality. Key Themes and Concepts -Men plan cities, women experience cities. -Cities as culture are fundamentally female, and the city is often seen as organic and feminine, wild and emotional. -The city reformers promoted cleanliness, sanitation, and crackdown on prostitution and other women dominated vices. -The same reformers on paper supported individualism and democracy, yet feared the urban mob which was a revolutionary danger.