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This research endeavors to fill a conceptual gap in the social science literature on gender, public space, and urban mobilities by exploring how transgender and gender nonconforming individuals experience public transit. Although previous research has surveyed gender minorities about harassment and discrimination in a range of environments, little is known about the quality or content of these experiences. Drawing from 25 interviews with transgender and gender nonconforming individuals in Portland, Oregon, this article finds that gender minorities experience frequent harassment while engaging with the public transit system. We articulate the concept of transmobilites to describe the ways that transgender and gender nonconforming individuals experience a form of mobility that is altered, shaped, and informed by a broader cultural system that normalizes violence and harassment towards gender minorities. We conclude that gender minorities have unequal access to safe and accessible public transportation when harassment is widespread, normalized, and when policies prohibiting discrimination remain unenforced on urban public transit.

AIDS media lead unexpected lives once distributed through urban space: billboards fade, posters go missing, bumper stickers travel to other cities. The materiality of AIDS campaign objects and of the urban settings in which they are displayed structures how the public interprets their messages. Ethnographic observation of AIDS media in situ and interview data reveal how the materiality of objects and places shapes the availability of AIDS knowledge in Accra, Ghana. Significantly for AIDS organizations, these material conditions often systematically obstruct access to AIDS knowledge for particular groups. Attending to materiality rethinks how scholars assess the cultural power of media.

The notion of a hidden city of social reproduction, suggests that the uneven relations and material practices of social reproduction are respectively hidden and targeted by a neo-liberal urban agenda. A discussion of the public-private Grand Central Partnership in New York City, reveals some of the ways that this agenda is pursued through preservation, and addresses how particular social actors and their activities are removed from view in the interests of ensuring "orderly," "clean," and "safe" public space.

The proliferation of alluring, distinctive and exclusive public spaces in many postindustrial cities raises the question of how far these environments are truly "public." Focusing on this question, this article explores the changing "publicness" of a recently redeveloped space in the city center of Newcastle upon Tyne, Britain, in relation to the dimensions of access, actor and interest. It further seeks to underline two emerging trends: the blurring of distinction between public and private spaces in the public realms of postindustrial cities; and the threat posed by image-led regeneration strategies to the everyday needs of and the civic functioning of genuine public spaces.

This article discusses how ever-increasing video-surveillance is changing the nature of urban space. The article evaluates whether surveillance can be seen as a means of making space safer and ‘more available’. The main focus is on surveillance in publicly accessible spaces, such as shopping malls, city streets and places for public transport. The article explains how space under surveillance is formed, and how it is related to power structures and human emotions. Space is conceptualized from various viewpoints. Three concepts of space are postulated: space as a container, power-space and emotional space. The purpose is not to construct a meta-theory of space; rather, the concepts are used as ‘tools’ for exploring the issue of surveillance. It is argued that video-surveillance changes the ways in which power is exercised, modifies emotional experiences in urban space and affects the ways in which ‘reality’ is conceptualized and understood. Surveillance contributes to the production of urban space.

Research has identified several factors that affect fear of crime in public space. However, the extent to which gender moderates the effectiveness of fear-reducing measures has received little attention. Using data from the Chicago Transit Authority Customer Satisfaction Survey of 2003, this study aims to understand whether train transit security practices and service attributes affect men and women differently. Findings indicate that, while the presence of video cameras has a lower effect on women's feelings of safety compared with men, frequent and on-time service matters more to male passengers. Additionally, experience with safety-related problems affects women significantly more than men. Conclusions discuss the implications of the study for theory and gender-specific policies to improve perceptions of transit safety.

This article examines the ways in which individuals use MP3 players to shape their experiences of the London commute. To investigate MP3 listening practices, I conducted semi-structured qualitative interviews with eight DJs and ‘listeners’ living in London. I argue that MP3 players enable individuals to use music to precisely shape their experiences of space, place, others and themselves while moving through the city. In doing so, individuals experience great control as they transform urban journeys into private and pleasurable spaces. While experienced effects of MP3 player listening were similar among respondents, pre-existing relationships to music appear to relate to motivations for use. This article draws on a variety of social theorists ranging from Simmel and Adorno to Lefebvre to interrogate the experience of control MP3 users describe, and to understand the implications for the autonomy of urban inhabitants.

Geographers have made important contributions to scholarship on the lived experiences of masculinity, highlighting the ways in which identities emerge through embodied and emplaced performances that are shaped by intersecting dimensions of gender, sexuality, race, class and religion. While a small number of studies have considered masculinity in relation to physical disability, more work is needed to examine other experiences of disability and the ways that they intersect with gender. In this article, we draw from feminist and queer disability theory to explore the social geographies of men with intellectual disability. We draw on in-depth, participatory research in Toronto to examine how men labeled/with intellectual disabilities imagine and enact masculinity in domestic settings and public places. Our analysis highlights that men confront multiple constraints and pervasive paternalism in public and domestic settings that frustrate their efforts to craft an adult identity. Partly in response, many men aspire to a normative heterosexual masculinity as a way to militate against the disabling conditions of everyday life. This reflects the tremendous pressure the men confront to ‘fit in’ but it also forecloses opportunities to imagine and enact other forms of disabled masculinity.

By studying the mathematical properties of metrics, we identify three fundamental characteristics of distance, which are optimality, detour and break. In this paper, we explore the implications of these properties for transport planning, urbanism and spatial planning. We state that distances contain the idea of optimum and that any distance is associated to a search for optimisation. Pedestrian movements obey this principle and sometimes depart from designed routes. Local suboptimality conveyed by public transport maps has to be corrected by interventions on public space to relieve the load on central parts of networks. The second principle we state is that detour in distances is most often a means to optimise movement. Fast transport systems generate most of the detour observed in geographical spaces at regional scale. This is why detour has to be taken into account in regional transport policies. The third statement is that breaks in movement contribute to optimising distances. Benches, cafe´s, pieces of art, railway stations are examples of the urban break. These facilities of break represent an urban paradox: they organise the possibility of a break, of a waste of time in a trip, and they also contribute to optimising distances in a wider network. In that sense, break should be considered as a relevant principle for the design of urban space in order to support a pedestrian-oriented urban form.

This paper argues that a strong focus on residential segregation limits the understanding of the role of the built environment. The city is used as more than just a place of residence; urban life is far from restricted to where we live. The potential for interplay that develops as people share public space is argued to be just as important for integration processes as the residential mix. In addition, this article examines shortcomings related to the definition of residential segregation because of limitations within the scientific analysis of urban space: the evident difficulties in delimiting relevant geographical units and delimiting relevant social groups. The study is based on empirical analysis of Sodertalje. Sodertalje topped international news when its mayor informed the US Congress that the city had managed to receive more refugees from the war in Iraq than the US and Canada combined. However, to what extent are these new immigrants given access to Swedish society through everyday practices? The results highlight how segregation in public space—including impaired accessibility to a range of resources such as places of work and contact with other people—is a very strong feature of excluded areas and is strongly disadvantageous for newcomers. These results challenge some of the beliefs in the current public debate as well as some of the principles used by Swedish authorities to ameliorate segregation.

Although a number of environmental and policy interventions to pro- mote physical activity are being widely used, there is sparse systematic information on the most effective approaches to guide population-wide interventions. Methods: We reviewed studies that addressed the following environmental and policy strat- egies to promote physical activity: community-scale urban design and land use policies and practices to increase physical activity; street-scale urban design and land use policies to increase physical activity; and transportation and travel policies and practices. These systematic reviews were based on the methods of the inde- pendent Task Force on Community Preventive Services. Exposure variables were classified according to the types of infrastructures/policies present in each study. Measures of physical activity behavior were used to assess effectiveness. Results: Two interventions were effective in promoting physical activity (community-scale and street-scale urban design and land use policies and practices). Additional information about applicability, other effects, and barriers to implementation are provided for these interventions. Evidence is insufficient to assess transportation policy and practices to promote physical activity. Conclusions: Because com- munity- and street-scale urban design and land-use policies and practices met the Community Guide criteria for being effective physical activity interventions, implementing these policies and practices at the community-level should be a priority of public health practitioners and community decision makers.

To date, research into the subjective aspects of high density has focused mainly on the negative consequences of overcrowding. This study, in contrast, outlines some of the positive aspects of high density in neighborhoods, exploring the physical-spatial environment of two neighborhoods in the city of Haifa, Israel. It was found that while the relatively high residential density was similar in both neighborhoods (40 housing units per acre), this was more positively evaluated in one neighborhood as compared to the other. This can be attributed to some specific environmental and planning features. In particular, where physical planning enabled the potential advantages of high density to be realized, this was positively perceived and evaluated by local residents. Such advantages mainly comprised accessibility to a variety of services, more frequent public transportation, and access to open spaces within walking distance. Particularly advantageous were the increased opportunities for social gathering. At the same time, however, high density did not foster social relationships at the neighborhood level. The study further identified the gender and age groups that benefited most from the high density. Thus, women evaluated high density more positively than men. Young families with children and senior citizens (over 65) were also more likely to benefit, and to evaluate the high density environment more positively than other social groups.

(no abstract available) Introduction: There are significant differences in physical inactivity in various geographical areas and among demographic groups. Previous research suggests that walking is the most common form of physical activity; however, not all built environments support walking for recreational or transportation purposes. Objective: The purpose of this study was to assess the extent to which area-level factors, poverty rate and racial distribution, are associated with aspects of the street-scale environment (i.e. sidewalk walkability and physical disorder) using community audits.

The social integration of a city depends on the extent to which people from different neighborhoods have the opportunity to interact with one another, but most prior work has not developed formal ways of conceptualizing and measuring this kind of connectedness. In this article, we develop original, network-based measures of what we call “structural connectedness” based on the everyday travel of people across neighborhoods. Our principal index captures the extent to which residents in each neighborhood of a city travel to all other neighborhoods in equal proportion. Our secondary index captures the extent to which travels within a city are concentrated in a handful of receiving neighborhoods. We illustrate the value of our indices for the 50 largest American cities based on hundreds of millions of geotagged tweets over 18 months. We uncover important features of major American cities, including the extent to which their connectedness depends on a few neighborhood hubs, and the fact that in several cities, contact between some neighborhoods is all but nonexistent. We also show that cities with greater population densities, more cosmopolitanism, and less racial segregation have higher levels of structural connectedness. Our indices can be applied to data at any spatial scale, and our measures pave the way for more powerful and precise analyses of structural connectedness and its effects across a broad array of social phenomena.

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Around the globe, streets and sidewalks in cities are being contested as spaces that should be used for more than transportation. This article challenges our understanding of both property rights and public space by applying a property rights framework to situate sidewalk use debates. It analyzes and maps the sidewalk property regimes of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, through a novel integration of surveying and ethnography. The case illuminates the feasibility of a mixed-use sidewalk that can be shared between various kinds of uses and users. A mixed-use sidewalk that is both cooperative and livable is possible if planners incorporate time into planning space in order to expand the sidewalk's flexibility and if local society can renarrate and enforce new legitimacies on the sidewalk. Takeaway for practice: Sidewalk space deserves more attention as an important public space. In our era of historic urbanization, we should reconceive sidewalks as a mixed-use space rather than an exclusively pedestrian zone. Moreover, North American planners would benefit from engaging with public space experiments happening in cities in the developing world. Research support: This research was supported by MIT's School of Architecture and Planning, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, and the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program.

This study examined patterns of activity in street-side public spaces in one city. Eye-level videotape was employed to document public activity, characteristics of the population and characteristics of the downtown street-side surroundings. A scheme for organizing the data is presented. Patterns of use, disaggregated across activities, groups and time periods were derived, and limitations and implications are discussed.