CityReads | Hägerstrand on Path, Project & Diorama

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Hägerstrand on Path, Project & Diorama

Torsten Hägerstrand’s work was influential to the emergence of human geography as a theoretically sophisticated social science.

Hägerstrand, T. (1982). Diorama, path and project. Tijdschrift Voor Economische En Sociale Geografie, 73(6), 323–339.

Latham, A. (2020). Diagramming the social: Exploring the legacy of Torsten Hägerstrand’s diagrammatic landscapes. Landscape Research, 45(6), 699–711.

Sources:https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9663.1982.tb01647.x

https://doi.org/10.1080/01426397.2020.1749579

Picture source: http://www.piastern.com/work/painting/inkonpaper/2016/mapping/geography-time

The work of Swedish geographer and social theorist Torsten Hägerstrand had a significant impact on the emergence of human geography as a theoretically sophisticated social science. In 1970, Hägerstrand proposed time-geography, providing a useful framework for studying human activities within spatial and temporal contexts. Hägerstrand focused particularly on the paths taken by individuals and organizations within urban spaces to accomplish their projects. Time-geography has been criticized for overly emphasizing the constraints of the material world and reducing individuals to mere objects, but many of these criticisms involve misunderstandings. The world we live in today is vastly different from the era when Hägerstrand introduced his time-geography concepts over fifty years ago. So, what relevance does Hägerstrand's research hold for us today?

Let me quote Nigel Thrift's evaluation of Hägerstrand:

“Hägerstrand has often been described as a physicalist . . . I prefer to see him as an early critique of social constructivism, producing a critique of the kind most often associated with the work of a rediscovered Tade and,latterly, Latour. In particular…time-geography makes it possible to go beyond social constructivism by emphasising the physical constraints on human action and the wider networks of competing opportunities that they set up which act to steer situations. . . . [T]hose time-geographic diagrams did something else too. They radically lessened the distinction between humans and other objects. They provided a kind of neutrality of representation, even a democracy of description, of the world.”

The following is an edited excerpt from Torsten Hägerstrand's 1982 autobiographical essay "Diorama, Path, and Project." Hägerstrand grew up in a schoolhouse in a village in southern Sweden. His father was a school principal, and the schoolchildren came from the surrounding areas. The village had five main pace setters: the ironworks, the school, the railway, the parish church, and the cows. In this essay, Hägerstrand uses his childhood experiences to illustrate several key time-geography concepts: path, project, and diorama. The essay also demonstrates how Hägerstrand's childhood experiences influenced his development of time-geography concepts.

In his 1976 essay on "Human Geography in Terms of Existential Anthropology", Christiaan Van Paassen gave me homework to do which has remained a source of concern ever since. Those familiar with the writings of Allan Pred, or with occasional translations of my own speculations, know that path and project are two of the fundamental concepts of time-geography. Having reviewed this and related ideas, Van Paassen felt compelled to ask: "Are projects autonomous? Do they originate independently from a situation?" These questions arose, I think, because in most empirical studies made within the frame of time-geography, the projects tested in given environments were selected a priori by the investigators. This procedure was deliberately chosen in order to challenge the assumption, which is widespread among economists and often applied in planning that observed behaviour reflects free choice guided by preferences and thus can be taken as norms. In order to elucidate the 'autonomy of action', observed behaviour is not satisfactory. The use of hypothetical projects instead seemed to be a means of getting away from the behavioural delusion. This choice of approach一which I still think is a helpful one—was never considered as being more than one in the range of possibilities inherent in timegeographic thinking. Seen in the wider perspective, the real-world generation of projects is clearly a fundamental issue. But it is also exceedingly difficult to cope with.

The concept of path (or trajectory) was introduced in order to help us to appreciate the significance of continuity in the succession of situations. We have to keep in mind that it refers not only to man but to all other packets of continuants which fill up our world. It is also essential to understand it as a reminder, although very abstract, of the 'live corporeality' of man and society to use Van Paassen's expressive term a circumstance almost totally neglected in the human and social sciences. Continuity and corporeality set limits on how and at what pace one situation can evolve into a following in a purely physical sense.

There are also other, less tangible, factors which influence the sequence of situations within the limits set by what is physically possible. Outstanding among these are human intentions. The factthat a human path in the time-geographic notation seems to represent nothing more than a point on the move should not lead us to forget that at its tip-as it were—in the persistent present stands a living body subject, endowed with memories, feelings, knowledge, imagination and goals in other words capabilities too rich for any conceivable kind of symbolic representation but decisive for the direction of paths. People are not paths, but they cannot avoid drawing them in space-time.

The broad generic concept of project was introduced in order to help us as geographers to do two things. We need to rise up from the flat map with its static patterns and think in terms of a world on the move, a world of incessant permutations. We need to have concepts which are able to relate events that happen to the strivings for purpose and meaning that we know are hidden behind many of them. The word project then, with its almost unlimited range of applicability, was meant to tie together into a whole all those 'cuts' in evolving situations that an actor must secure in order to reach a goal, be it mere individual survival or luxury happenings such as putting up a fence of cloth up and down the hills of California.

In a recent paper, Derek Gregory says "that there is a basic complementarity between 'projects' as conceived in time-geography and 'projects' as conceived in constitutive phenomenofogy". The latter is interested in intentional constitution, the former in practical realization. "...the two need to be brought together if we are to avoid a conceptual 'cutting into' the continuity of action. Only then, I suspect, will we grasp the full significance of reflexivity in the conduct of practical life" . I fully agree. There is nothing inherent in the time-geographic project concept as such which sets up a barrier between intention and realization. But I must admit that I find it difficult to see how one can deal with the matter in actual empirical research. How does one make these backward rooted, side-bound and forward moving, deeply hidden and transient, intentional energies visible? The practical realizations of projects are possible to observe, at least in principle. The configurations of underlying intentions and broader meanings are not. Even if it is true as Barrett tells us that "meanings are first and foremost not in the mind but in the world, in the linkings and interconnections of things we find there", an observer cannot entirely conclude what they are from the practical realizations he sees. Intentions have a high death rate. And the surviving ones have to adjust.

Already as simple a project as a spoken sentence suffers from the limits set by the corporeal world because words have to be lined up in a queue to form sentences, while the underlying image might well be of a quite different order of synchronic richness which simply cannot be communicated while it is there. So, we find no simple and straightforward relation between intention and observable realization; perhaps we have to do with one of the most complex processes in the whole universe. Already this circumstance makes empirical studies problematic. The task is not made simpler by the understanding that intentions are bound up with past and present situations and that their realizations have to find their vulnerable tracks through situations to come. Nevertheless, I see no real difference of opinion concerning this perspective. But beyond this, I have some reservations.

In the remarks quoted from Van Paassen and Gregory the thought seems to lie hidden that it is illegitimate to study projects apart from their situational contexts, as 'physicalistic' and 'idealistic' entities. If this is really the view, I would reject it. I think both the 'situational' and the 'idealistic' approaches are important and useful. I see them as complementary to each other. Projects are going concerns in the flow of real life. This is undeniable. But I am not able to give up the idea that they also can be seen as "objective constructions of the human mind", to quote Sir Karl Popper. They have then a blueprint reality, like for example mathematical theorems, or at least many of them have. If this were not the case, how could culture exist? My impression of life is that, to a large extent, we are bound to take out projects from the blueprint library more or less in the same way as a pianist picks out ready-made tones from his instrument. Therefore, I see no good reason to bracket off the study of projects as autonomous and idealistic blueprints.

As far as I can see, one should, at least for analytical purposes, make a distinction between the decision (if that is the right word; submission might sometimes be more adequate) to launch a project and the space/time/trajectory shape which subsequently must emerge for its realization. The first event is clearly understandable only in terms of the situation. The latter might also require this perspective, if we have to do with a new creation. When, on the other hand, a standard pattern is called forth, then the situation does not explain the shape per se, but knowledge of the ideal shape helps us to interpret the coalitions and conflicts that emerge when the project paves its way forwards in time, negotiating with the situations that have to be coped with.

Thus, as I prefer to understand the concept, it is possible, legitimate and useful to understand and study projects both as historical entities, rooted in the flow of life, and as ready-made blueprints, preserved in the store-house of culture. Situations, on the other hand, are different. They can hardly in any meaningful way be extricated from the flow of life. They are not creations of the human mind but emerge out from the historically given. One may say that situations contain a mixture of many actors' projects, but this mixture does not exhaustively define them. Winter, to take just one example, has thwarted the projects of many army leaders.

In ordinary language the word situation refers to "a position or condition at the moment" or "a position with regard to surroundings". Both formulations, and the second most clearly, indicate that a situation does not present itself in general but has to be seen from the vantage point of somebody or something. Even with this limitation, a broad range of meanings remains. In a very wide and abstract sense, every somebody or something is in a situation with respect to everybody and everything else. But the way in which this is the case, is beyond description. In a more limited and apprehensible sense, a situation takes shape as such only in relation to a defined direction of change or action. To take a case from inanimate nature, the same building is in two different situations depending on whether a flood or a fire is nearing. Similarly, the situation of a person comes out with one configuration when he is just hurrying on to find protection against a shower of rain, and with another when he is trying to find a new job. The change of goal perspective in time and space brings about a reformulation of the relevant situation. So, here we come across the reflexive relation between project and situation. The situation is undetermined until a project defines it. On the other hand, whether an initiator of a project can bring it to a desired end will depend on what events the subsequent situations permit from moment to moment.

Below the level of observation of (and participation in) the interplay between projects and situations, another level of reality resides which makes the interplay at all possible by its 'thereness'. Nothing can become part of a project or of a situation without first being there as an idea, a feeling, an organism or a thing. At any moment these existents have a finite number-although in practice uncountable—and definite locations.

Ideas and feelings are divisible in the sense that they can move on to receivers and still remain in the possession of the senders. Organisms and things are different. They are indivisible—in other words, they are bound to be either here or there but cannot be in both places. They are on the whole fewer in number and more durable than the combinations into which they can enter. To move a project forwards, then, is to be able to hold back competing claims, to step in at gaps and to mobilize substitutes. In this context, the preexisting location of input members is a crucial part of the situation against which a project has to be pursued.

The best approximation we have in geography to a concept capable of grasping the momentary thereness and relative location of all continuants is landscape. So, let me take that as a vantage point. For the initiator of a project, the landscape in which he finds himself defines the grand situation which constitutes the conditions of his actions. Most important of all, the human body subjects, the keepers of memories, feelings, thoughts and intentions and initiators of projects must be accepted as elements of this living landscape. This proposition leaves us with no sharp boundary between landscape and society. Some intangible societal phenomena are durable and located like corporeal phenomena. Property boundaries are cases in point. Status positions, on the other hand, adhere to human beings and move with them as a kind of decoration. Similarly, rules and regulations receive there reality by being understood and respected as real by humans, and they are therefore present in the landscape as much as are the things we can see and touch. Perhaps one ought to mark the richness of the concept by using a word which holds it apart from the conventional idea of landscape. To my knowledge, we have no entirely satisfactory word available for the purpose. The closest approximation I have been able to find is 'diorama', the term used for arrangements in museums which show animals and people suspended in their normal environments. But when borrowing this term, it must be clearly understood that the essential characteristic does not lie in the visual property, but in the thereness aspect. All sorts of entities are in touch with each other in a mixture produced by history, whether visible or not. Only when we have recognized the finegrained structure of a diorama are we in a position to appreciate how situations evolve as an aggregate outcome quite apart from the specific intentions actors might have had when they conceived and launched projects out from their different positions.

In general, I think, there are more projects in the making than can possibly be accommodated in a given diorama. This is so because of the unavoidable scarcity of inputs at hand. The nature of this scarcity and the consequences of it are difficult to deal with in general terms.It does not really become available for closer examination until we direct the searchlight at a real 'diorama'. We need a portrait of the grand situation before we can begin to look at the reflexivity between the more limited situations and projects which move the content of the diorama forwards in time and gradually change it to something partly or totally different. In the configuration of grains in the diorama lies one of the keys to its subsequent transformation.

A real-world diorama as I understand it can never be fully accessible or describable in an empirical manner. The fullness must instead be taken as the ceiling of a way of viewing the world, the geographic way in its most genuine sense. Nevertheless, it should help us to observe relations which would escape us otherwise. It should help us to ask questions which we would not ask without it. And it should help us to estimate the importance of what we have to leave out of consideration, because we know at least the locus of what is left out.

The limited ability to grasp what is there falls upon both the outside observer and the participant, the 'insider'. But the limits probably assert themselves in different ways. The outsider might be able to perceive things which for the insider are simply too familiar to be of interest. The insider, on the other hand, is involved in the network of meanings that bind the human inhabitants together, and in his own case he might even be able to trace the roots of projects back to their finer details .

At this point, I find it difficult to proceed any further without support of a real-world diorama with non-invented situations, paths and projects to become food for further discussion. We have good reason to assume that even those scholars who prefer to talk about societal matters in very general terms, in fact have outlooks strongly dependent upon their own experience as members of society—how could it be otherwise? Rather than concealing this tendency, I will now take the liberty to make explicit use of it and try to call forth a diorama of which I once was an insider during my first formative years. This is not in order to write an autobiography but in order to paint a picture of a kind which no field expedition or documentary study could reveal. At the centre of attention is still the question posed by Van Paassen about project and situation.

The most general formulation of the meaning of project in time-geography is "the entire series of simple or complex tasks necessary to the completion of any intention-inspired or goaloriented behavior". When combined with the idea of time/space paths (or trajectories), we might conclude that any project for its realization requires a sequence of bundles of paths, delineated by a mixed assortment of entities. Depending on the nature of the goal, these bundles must have a certain logical, consecutive order and individual duration, apart from some tolerable flexibility. One important aspect of flexibility is to what extent projects can 'survive' interruptions.

Taken in this very broad sense, projects frequently contain each other like Chinese boxes. This means that the sequences of bundles can be described at various degrees of resolution. Seen in the long term and with little spatial detail, the establishment of a factory or a schooI is a project. So is also, seen in more detail, the fabrication of a machine or the educational program of a week. Still further down in scale, we might distinguish the casting of a cog-wheel or a lesson in history. We might go even further down in detail. It is almost like looking for smaller and smaller constituents of matter. But in the case of projects, up and down the scale, no bundle can come into being until the suitable 'path-makers' are free to join. Since in a diorama only a limited number of 'path-makers' are there, projects become interdependent in a situational sense, even if they belong to realms of action which per se are unrelated.

The point with these remarks is to illustrate that human societies have a limited capacity to make room for projects, given certain values and a certain technology. When trying to understand what Giddens, Pred and others call 'structuration', it is therefore an essential task to study the relative strength of projects in competition. But then the factors at work can be fully appreciated only in a diorama perspective.

My starting point in this essay was the question posed by Christiaan Van Paassen concerning the project concept in time-geography and its relation to "the real life of real people". There are three points, though, that I want to stress.

The first is that without a diorama approach, the revealing power of time-geography cannot be fully explored. But this poses a tremendous problem for studies of the modern urban world, since the question of thereness is so confusing, particularly where the links between people and communication are concerned. These problems must be solved by adequate sampling procedures, whatever these are (but for goodness sake, don't believe that I am thinking of the kind of sampling modern statistics is pursuing).

The second thing is that autobiographical material, referring to the scholar himself, has value as a source of understanding beyond the normal documentary evidence one can mobilize for getting hold of unquestionably objective circumstances. Only one's own experience is able to provide the kind of intimate detail which can bring the study of project and situation into any real depth. There are of course ambiguities of many sorts in memories, as there are in documentary sources. The remedy is to treat both residues as honestly as one possibly can.

My third point is that path, project and diorama are simple concepts, readily understand able to everybody, even to a child. This means, I think, that the investigator can draw rather easily upon not only his own experience but everybody's. My hope is that we have devices which can make people's stories an even literature into productive inputs to research and also make output of research more generally understandable than is now the case.

CityQuotes

1.“The perception of space and the representation of space do not involve the same things. There is no mere apprehension of unchanging spatial criteria and no static reading of topological data. Western culture’s views of space and time are still beholden to models inherited from the Enlightenment or, more directly, from positivism. Just as time is not reducible to a river metaphor that would enshrine it as a gradual and horizontal unfolding or to a sagittal metaphor that establishes its reversibility, space is not the empty container of a Euclidean geometry adapted for the use of the positivists. The Einsteinian revolution broke through these metaphors. Everything is now relative, even the absolute.”

—Bertrand Westphal, Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Space (La Géocritique: Réel, Fiction, Espace), translated by Robert T. Tally Jr.

2.“Hägerstrand seems more like Foucault, Michel de Certeau, and Pierre Bourdieu, inasmuch as they associate the rhetoric of displacement with a reflection on the locations of bodies within a social space regulated by an authority. Hägerstrand’s model incorporates the effects of individual attitudes in dealing with space-time. He pays particular attention to the pathways selected and used by the individual to accomplish his or her goals in urban space-time. Spatial progression over time is subject to several constraints. The first of these lies in biological vectors (nonubiquity, noninstantaneous displacement, and relative means of transportation); a second derives from interpersonal relationships of the individual whose lingering in one place may be dictated by an entourage (by, say, the length of a conversation or a certain job to do, etc.); and a third relates to the injunctions of an authority that can determine access to certain places or prohibit it altogether. Hägerstrand’s theory has had a significant impact in areas such as urban planning and studies on social equity (e.g., adjusting the spatial requirements of doors for disabled people, modulation of space according to gender, and so on).“

—Bertrand Westphal, Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Space (La Géocritique: Réel, Fiction, Espace), translated by Robert T. Tally Jr.

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