Search

Mobile phone data are considered one of the most promising information sources for monitoring and measuring the spatio-temporal activities of the population. Today, large-volume mobile phone datasets are widely applied to monitor the daily life of the urban population and to examine the structuring of the urban environment. In this paper, we discuss and develop a methodological procedure that uses such data to observe temporal differences of human presence in Bratislava, Slovakia. The study is based on a large-scale dataset of hourly records of signalling exchanges (VLR data) from all major mobile network operators in Slovakia. The records of the mobile network infrastructure are used as a suitable proxy variable for complex human activity at the city level, in the sense that they capture various kinds of spatial practices, and not only some specific activities (work cycle of a given locale, shopping, and similar events). Such an approach allows the classification of urban space using diurnal logs activity curves of mobile network cells. Six temporality types in Bratislava were identified, which may be designated as examples of an urban chronopolis. The results show the potential of the proposed method for measuring place temporality in cities and monitoring the urban environment with geo-referenced mobile phone data.

Urban rhythmicity, the topic of this paper, is to a certain extent a reflexion of the current discourse on approaches to urban research. The presented paper approaches everyday urbanism through rhythms. An urban place can be defined not only by its spatial attributes, but also through its affiliation to a particular spatio-temporal system. For this purpose the paper employs two theoretical traditions – Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis and Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope. Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis should be seen here primarily as a framing outline, whereas Bakhtin’s chronotope provides considerably more analytical power to delimit temporally-defined urban place as a typological category. These two traditions however offer only limited possibilities to follow temporal connections among the set of spatially dislocated places. For this reason, this paper develops Laguerre’s concept of chronopolis, reconceptualised at the city-scale level. This paper aims to (i) further explore the nature of “urban polyrhythmia”; (ii) describe particular places as specific chronotopes; (iii) identify particular types of chronotopes based on the similarity of rhythmical profiles (chronopolis); and finally, (iv) to define the city as a set of particular chronopoles. The empirical part of the paper analyses a selection of localities within the space of Brno, Czech Republic. Based on long-term observations, a daily rhythm profile was described for each of 18 chosen urban localities. Particular types of chronopoles are identified according to their common rhythmical profiles stemming from the presence and absence of human users. The empirical part of the paper identified four different chronopoles (work-cycle, return, hot-spot, centre) that enable a description of the city as an ensemble of temporally rhythmized and spatially dislocated places. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Time and space are two of the main features in Ballard’s fiction. They are also the main topic in this short story. In Chronopolis the measurement of time is forbidden. When the story’s main character, Newman, discovers the existence of clocks, he decides to defy the law to restore the previous condition. In doing so he moves from the city he used to live in to the old forsaken city. So, he moves both in time and space. He pursues the utopia of liberating time, and man, from the Orwellian prohibition of dealing with linear time. But he fails eventually, being imprisoned for having tried to break free from the State control of time. His crossing of the symbolic border between the new and the old city is a passage from a static, present time to a flowing linear time, not limited to the present. But the old Chronopolis in a sense has become a non-place, while the new one has been deprived of time, thus being characterized by non-time. Since these notions are represented by the terms, respectively, utopia and uchronia, ultimately this means a disappearing of Chronopolis on an imaginary Cartesian graph displaying it.