Over the past century, time has become increasingly decoupled from the natural rhythms of the environment. The clock now dictates the pace of daily activities, contributing to the acceleration of everyday life and the growing detachment of people from their surroundings. This has resulted in reduced control over one’s own time, leading to increasingly fragmented, separated, and isolated forms of everyday life. To create more liveable, human-centred spaces, it is therefore necessary to challenge the capitalist rhythm and the linear understanding of clock time, moving towards slower, more human-oriented urban rhythms.
Building on this problem, the cumulative PhD thesis explores the relationship between space, time and movement. Drawing on Thorsten Hägerstrand’s time geography, Henri Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis and Carlos Moreno’s concept of the 15-minute city, as well as everyday lived experiences, the thesis proposes a new planning paradigm: Time-Sensitive Spatial Planning. The thesis (1) examines how time-geographical constraints, infrastructural temporalities, and lived temporal experiences shape everyday urban, peri-urban, and suburban rhythms, and (2) explores how these factors can contribute to a new time-sensitive spatial planning culture based on the concept of the 15-minute city, moving beyond a static, space-centred perspective.
The thesis emphasises the importance of greater awareness of time, and of integrating the temporal dimension into the planning, organisation and management of space. The thesis contributes to the development of a new planning culture based on an integrated, time-sensitive approach to spatial planning. This approach addresses people’s everyday needs, recognises the distinct rhythms of different places and acknowledges the various uses of spaces at different times. This approach considers a wide range of settlement structures – from monocentric to decentralised and polycentric spaces – and their specific temporal patterns.
