This week we are resharing an episode from a great weekly show about the intersection between sustainable transportation, urban planning, and economic development. It's hosted by Jeff Wood of The Overhead Wire and we think you will really enjoy it.
This episode is an interview with Dr. Jennifer Kent, Senior Research Fellow in Urbanism at the University of Sydney, to talk about her work on family transportation, the messiness of travel for parents, and loneliness and the built environment.
Follow us on social media for more content related to each episode:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/booked-on-planning/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/BookedPlanning
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bookedonplanning
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bookedonplanning/
This week we are resharing an episode from a great weekly show about the intersection between sustainable transportation, urban planning, and economic development. It's hosted by Jeff Wood of The Overhead Wire and we think you will really enjoy it.
This episode is an interview with Dr. Jennifer Kent, Senior Research Fellow in Urbanism at the University of Sydney, to talk about her work on family transportation, the messiness of travel for parents, and loneliness and the built environment.
Follow us on social media for more content related to each episode:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/booked-on-planning/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/BookedPlanning
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bookedonplanning
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bookedonplanning/
You're listening to the Booked On Planning podcast, a project of the Nebraska chapter of the American Planning Association. In each episode, we dive into how cities function by talking with others on housing, transportation and everything in between. Join us as we get Booked On Planning. Welcome back, Bookworms, to another episode of Booked On Planning. This episode is actually not one of our own, but an episode we're resharing from Talking Headways a great podcast that we highly recommend that you check out.
Jennifer Hiatt:The episode you're about to listen to is the Messiness of Family Travel, where host Jeff Wood interviews Dr Jennifer Kent, senior Research Fellow in Urbanism at the University of Sydney, to talk about her work on family transportation, the messiness of travel for parents and the loneliness in the built environment.
Stephanie Rouse:As a transportation planner myself, it was really interesting as a way to reframe how people travel and understand travel from the perspective of families that don't necessarily have these linear trip chains and often feel like that they need a car in order to get around in their daily routines because they're faced with the necessity of taking kids to all sorts of different activities in addition to their own daily commute.
Jennifer Hiatt:I was actually listening to this episode while I was traveling myself and I kept thinking about these two families that I noticed while traveling, one taking a commuter train and the other on an airplane and I just kept thinking travel is harder when you have to do it with more than just yourself, so I was getting around it.
Jeff Wood:Well, Jennifer Kent, welcome back to the Talking Headways podcast.
Jennifer Kent:Thanks, jeff, it's great to be back.
Jeff Wood:Thanks so much for being here. I'm wondering if you can tell folks who hadn't listened to the previous episode you were on, if you could tell us a little bit about yourself.
Jennifer Kent:Yeah, sure. So I'm Jennifer Kent. I'm from the University of Sydney, which is in Australia. I'm currently sitting here and it's 30 degrees Celsius in the middle of summer. It's nice. My research interests are all about the links between urban planning, transport and human health, and I'm really driven by a desire to understand how we can challenge private car use in a way that is equitable and doesn't detract from people's quality of life. I'm an urban planner by trade. I've worked in private practice as an urban planner, which was pretty much what drove me to get into academia, because I found it really frustrating. And, yeah, aside from that, personally speaking, I'm pretty obsessed with dashhounds. Is that anything to anybody? They're sausage dogs. Yeah, that's me.
Jeff Wood:Nice. I'm curious how did you get to be interested in it? You call them dashhounds.
Jennifer Hiatt:Yeah.
Jeff Wood:Okay, I mean, I don't know. I've heard Dachshund.
Jennifer Hiatt:Yeah.
Jeff Wood:So I know exactly what you're talking about the little wiener dogs. But I'm curious how you get into Dachshund are dashhounds?
Jennifer Kent:Yeah, great question. I don't know how anybody gets into them, but whoever is into them it always seems to become a bit of an obsession because they're a breed of their own. They're just so sassy and so much personality in such a little dog. I think I first became interested in them because one of my really good friends said to me if I was going to be an animal I would definitely be a dashhound. And she's a really good friend and I really like her and that made me think. Well, if she wants to be a dashhound, then I suppose they must be a good breed.
Jennifer Kent:So that's, what got you to them, and once you're into them, you can't get out of them. It becomes an obsession.
Jeff Wood:I totally understand. At some point I think we'll get a dog, but not the moment the kiddo is too young. But at some point.
Jennifer Kent:Yeah, dachshunds do not have the ability to conceptualize the fact that they are anything less than a human, and I think that the welcoming of my son, who's now three years old I think my dashhound is still kind of getting over that that there is another sort of child in the house.
Jeff Wood:So, as a head, another important being, another important being.
Jennifer Kent:She just doesn't realize that she is anything less. It's amazing.
Jeff Wood:Well, that's actually related to what we chatted about on episode 342. And we talked about pets and transportation and all those things and how they impact travel behavior, specifically dogs. I'm also wondering how you've been over the last two years since we've chatted. I mean, we chatted in the middle of the pandemic. It was 2021 or so I'm guessing a little bit's happened since then in terms of your research and what you've been working on.
Jennifer Hiatt:Yeah absolutely.
Jennifer Kent:I mean, I've sort of shifted from dogs to looking at the way families travel, kind of taking all the things that I was sort of working through with the dog and transport and applying that to, I guess, a more universal experience, looking at the way that parents travel with their children, the way that parents use transport to facilitate the parenting task. And I think the main thing that I've transposed is this idea of that transport is really messy and I think that parenting conceptualizes that kind of mess. And my theory of looking at parents is that, look, if we can get parents out of private cars, that is going to be one of the key groups to be able to accommodate with alternative transport. And so they're kind of like the canary in the coal mine, in that they represent the kind of mess and complexity that characterizes modern life for so many of us. So that's my sort of rationale for focusing on parents, and in doing that I've become really interested in the idea of.
Jennifer Kent:It was sort of brought up by your previous episode with Greg Shill and Jonathan Levine how they were talking about this idea of accessibility, that we should be looking at transport as facilitating access rather than transport as a practice in itself.
Jennifer Kent:And I've been taking that one step further and thinking well, we should be looking at transport as facilitating practices.
Jennifer Kent:So when we're driving a car we're not, for example, driving a car to access a destination, we're actually driving a car to perform a practice, whether that practice is the practice of shopping, dropping a child to school, so the practice of educating your child, going to visit family and friends. And we're looking at it like that. If we take it sort of a level deeper, even than the access conceptualization, we start to realize that it's not just a matter of providing people with access to specific destinations. It's about providing people with access to the practices that they want to perform. And I think that really brings to the fore this idea that people do want choice. They don't want to just have a supermarket within walking distance, they want to have the supermarket that they want to go to within walking distance. And even though providing access is a big part of it, if we undermine that sort of choice component, we're really underestimating the complexity of the transport task that we're trying to facilitate. So that's what I'm exploring at the moment, I suppose in a nutshell.
Jeff Wood:I think it's just so fascinating, and especially since I have almost eight months old now, and so there's new things that are happening that I have to focus on as a car free household trying to get her to get vaccinated, for example, and all those things.
Jeff Wood:So there's all of these new layers to my travel, when I go places, when we go to my parents' house and on the other side of the bay, those types of things.
Jeff Wood:So it's interesting to kind of layer my previous experience as a car free household with my wife and then now an experience with a little person in the household and all those trips. And so I contacted you because I was really fascinated with your discussion about loneliness and the peace in the conversation that you had. But then you sent me the paper where you talked about parenting and I just immediately got immersed in the parental transportation because I feel like it's something that if you're not a parent, you probably didn't think much about it before. You saw other people doing these things or you might have had friends who were taking care of kids. So, outside of your vision, you're worried about your situation and your world, and so I think it's interesting when you start to introduce that factor of children, it starts to kind of change the calculus overall, which I think you've probably experienced as well, since you mentioned that you have your three-year-old.
Jennifer Kent:Yeah, absolutely. Congratulations, by the way, thanks. But I mean it's great that you've had that experience to sort of go from having what may not have seemed at the time but now probably seems quite a clean sort of predictable lifestyle into that just mess of having to get vaccinations, having to pack all sorts of things to be able to go anywhere. It really brings to the fore how it's like a traveling circus.
Jennifer Kent:Yeah, absolutely. And you know what Like it only gets more and more complex. And that's something I'm really interested in exploring is the way that our transport demands change through the parenting journey. So parenthood for a lot of people is just experienced as this 18-year period of transition as the child goes through ages and stages, the transport needs associated with that change.
Jennifer Kent:And I think too often in research we focus on one particular point in time in the parenting journey as a point of intervention to be able to get parents out of cars.
Jennifer Kent:So often we focus on car free households that have a child and, unlike you, then purchase a car to be able to facilitate what they need for that.
Jennifer Kent:But it's actually there's a lot of points of intervention where a car free household might be likely to go oh look, we're really going to need to have a car to do this. So one of those points is when kids start primary school, elementary school in the US, and they start to do all these extracurricular after school activities, which is really hard to facilitate that if you don't have a car, unless you're living in a really transit rich, dense neighborhood where those activities are not dispersed all over the city. So there's all these sorts of different stages where your transport needs a chopping and changing, and I think what I've found is that in so many ways, the private car really orders that mess for parents. So, as you know, the entry into parenthood is a really daunting experience and so many people, I think that's when they're really craving this sort of sense of security and privacy and autonomy and flexibility and safety that a private car can bring. So it really is a sticky space when we're talking about trying to get parents out of cars.
Jeff Wood:I think you had a quote in here that I think was really fascinating in the paper. In essence, families are messy. They have messy conversations, messy interactions and messy ways of using time and space. In so many ways, the private car orders this mess such that it does not spill into the public realm of a train, carriage, footpath or vehicle shared with other families. And I was thinking about that because I think when you go places with a kid, or if you've even been on an airplane and you're sitting next to someone with a kid, if you're a parent already, you probably have this empathy. If you're not a parent already, you have this begrudging oh my gosh, I have to sit next to this kid.
Jeff Wood:And the same with restaurants and things like that. There's people who don't want children to be allowed in restaurants and stuff like that. So you kind of get shamed almost into trying to keep all that internal right, all that messiness internal, so that you're not bothering other people. I mean, I don't like bothering other people, I'm sure you don't like bothering other people, but sometimes a young child or a toddler, they don't care, they don't have that sense of shame yet. And so focusing on thinking about transport from that perspective I think is really fascinating, from that messiness but also kind of the I'm using the word shame, but I hope that kind of conveys what I'm trying to get across.
Jennifer Kent:No, I think it does. I mean, if it's not shame then maybe it's just a desire not to impinge on other people. You know, we live in a very individualized and private society and overstepping that unsaid line does bring bad feelings upon yourself. I mean, I think another piece that I'm working on at the moment is the idea that the car kind of facilitates, if not actually becomes, what used to be the village that surrounds the mother when he starts to raise a child. So I think you would have heard that expression it takes a village to raise a child. And we don't have that village anymore.
Jennifer Kent:We are very individualized and private in society and I'm wondering how much COVID has actually augmented that idea that we're in our private realm so much and less reaching out to society for help. And so I think the private car in so many ways creates that village for the parents as they enter into the parenthood, because it firstly allows for you to get out there and connect in a very easy way and secondly it provides you with that space to just retreat and be in your private realm. I mean, I'm not sure how many people have actually done this, but just anecdotally it seems to be quite common the amount of parents who will put the kid in the car and get in the car and put the radio on just to get a little bit of peace. Your eight month old may not be all that mobile at the moment. Once they start walking around and talking, it's like how do I actually constrain this child in some way? And I know that people use the car for that purpose.
Jeff Wood:So yeah.
Jennifer Kent:I think that's a really interesting point.
Jeff Wood:So I want to talk about the areas of familial travel.
Jeff Wood:Well, first I want to say I think this is really interesting a research paper that you cited said the presence of children is a bigger determining factor of car ownership than socioeconomic status, density or other factors, which I didn't had no idea that that was something that.
Jeff Wood:But it makes sense right, because it seems to be that a person with a child equals a person with a car because of all of these obligations that they have and they feel like they can't be car free or tackle transport that way. But I want to talk about these four areas of familial travel that you bring up in the paper because I think these are really kind of stick to the reasons why people make that choice of a car over maybe active transportation, bike walk or even now micro mobility, those types of things. But I want to talk through each of these because I think it's really fascinating to kind of go through the details. The first one is the amount of travel needed for care work, and now in the United States there's been a lot of discussion about care infrastructure, especially around the most recent infrastructure bill and the Inflation Reduction Act, and there was a whole discussion about what care actually means here, but I'm wondering what this means to you in particular, the care work and the amount of care that travel entails.
Jennifer Kent:Yeah, well, I mean, I think I was raising that point, because one of the things that really bothers me with transport research is that and it comes back a little bit to what Greg and Jonathan was sort of saying about the different metrics that we use are really flawed, I think, because we are so obsessed with, you know, the journey to work and those really predictable trips, we don't even have ways for counting or having any kind of quantification of the kind of travel that goes on with families. I mean, there's different travel surveys out there, but I don't think we've found a really good way to conceptualise and quantify that complexity. So that was the first reason I was sort of focusing on that idea of care as a determinant of travel. But there's something even deeper, I think, about the way that the moral sort of obligation to care for your child or to care for significant others determines our travel choices.
Jennifer Kent:And there's this idea in philosophy and in ethics about the partiality of care, and that's just basically that idea that it's totally morally and ethically sanctioned in our society to prioritise the care of your kin over those of others.
Jennifer Kent:And I find it interesting the way that parents very definitely do that. I mean, there's that old story I can't remember the exact philosopher that first boarded up. But if there's two children drowning in a lake, you're totally ethically sanctioned to save your own child over the other child. And when we think about that in the context of private car use, you may have very strong values and beliefs around contributing to the greater good of society, having a lot of care about mitigating climate change and so forth and increasing equity of access across the city, but when it comes to caring for your child, those things seem to go out the window. All you're interested in, or what you become interested in, is providing a safe, comfortable, convivial space for your child and providing your child with access to the opportunities that all the other children have. And if that means having a car, then that's what you'll do. So that was the other reason I was really interested in care as a determinant of travel. There's the complexity, but there's also that moral, ethical obligation that parenting brings us with it.
Jeff Wood:The second one is messy trips of modern life and craving predictability, and so I'm thinking you know, we talked about the messiness, but why is predictability so important?
Jennifer Kent:I mean, maybe it's a good space probably for me to acknowledge my own position and my own bias that comes from being a parent and being a mother and having the experience of just the chaos that is raising a tiny human, and also the bias that I have in being a person who craves order and predictability.
Jennifer Kent:So obviously that is a personal thing, but I think it is a fairly universal experience in the vulnerability of parenthood and I think I use the term exquisite vulnerability because it is a very vulnerable time in your life, albeit a really precious time, when you just need to cling on to any kind of order that you can. I think that, although it's a personal experience, I think it's a common experience in parenting. The other thing is that we know from the research that children thrive with routine and with predictability as well. So we are taught that as parents that we need to provide that predictable environment for our children. I mean it starts from the very beginning, when you faced with this baby who doesn't sleep and you were taught that the best way to get them to sleep is to establish a good routine and a predictable routine, and when you're a sleep deprived parent, you will do absolutely anything to get that to happen. So I think that's what I'm talking about. That predictability is just such an important component of the parenting task.
Jeff Wood:Yeah, especially from a transport perspective. Right, you want to know exactly when you're going somewhere, how much time it takes. If you have a schedule to keep the kid on, like a sleep schedule or a feeding schedule or anything like that, any deviation from that norm that you've created makes it harder. And so, in the way that we've built our built environment, oftentimes if you don't live in a transit oriented neighborhood or a walkable neighborhood, that predictability goes out the window. If there's a 30 minute bus line near your house and it ends up being 45 minutes because of some scheduling thing or something happens to the bus bunching or something along those lines, and so that predictability is. I think it's not just a familial thing. It's generally why people are you know they'll take the car, because we've created a situation where the car is more predictable versus public transport or other modes that might be more friendly to the environment or society as a whole.
Jennifer Kent:Yeah, absolutely. I mean, when we think about it. Some earlier work that I did used the concept of ontological security. So that's basically just this idea that we have this desperate need to feel secure in our lives and autonomy is a big component of that. And you know, you can go back to more psychological conceptualizations like Maslow's hierarchy of needs, where self actualization and autonomy are actually a really innate human need.
Jennifer Kent:And I think that predictability is a big part of that, because it's very difficult to be autonomous in any way if you don't know what's going on. And regardless of whether that don't know, what's going on is you know, from the desperate side of not knowing where your next meal is going to come to the more subtle kind of not being able to schedule your time in an autonomous way In so many places and in so many ways the private car gives that kind of power to people and it's very easy, I think, for transport planners to think well, you know, that's just sort of fuzzy psychological stuff. We should be able to override that with structural provision, or people should be able to sort of deal with that in some way, with these aspirations for the greater good. But when it comes to actually challenging that. It's actually challenging something that's quite deep within us that we need to start to engage with as transport planners if we're going to be serious about challenging the private car, I think.
Jeff Wood:Yeah for sure. The third thing is the spatial attributes of familial trips are not linear, and I think you know if you've ever tried to do some trip chaining or anything like that and you found that the place that you want to go to is more of a triangle than a straight line. In terms of going multiple places, you realize that it might be easier if you can take a vehicle that is not on the one route that you're trying to get all your trips in. So I think that's fascinating as well. You know transit lines are linear quarters or linear trip chaining often isn't. So why are these spatial considerations important in this conversation specifically?
Jennifer Kent:Yeah, well, I think it comes back to this idea of mess and complexity. I mean it's really rare that you do have those linear sort of journeys when you're a family, basically because you're not just accommodating one person's linear, you know drive, linear what they're trying to accomplish. You're accommodating three people if you've got one child and you're living in a, in a partnership, for with the more children that you have, the more complex that becomes. So we've got to think of these sort of constellations of transport and demands and timetables and routines that needs to be accommodated, and that's where it starts to get really complex.
Jennifer Kent:I'm actually just working on a paper at the moment with Alexei Del Bosch from Monash University about the way that working from home tidies up some of this mess for families, and we start out by just articulating the sheer complexity of familial routines and familial transport demands, and we did interviews with 30 families.
Jennifer Kent:What we're trying to demonstrate is the way that that complexity gets dealt with and gets negotiated on a really daily, sometimes hourly, level, for families determines the way that they will travel, the way that working from home will be appreciated and so forth.
Jennifer Kent:So I think that if we can start to think about trips as less linear, we can start to sort of put some of those challenges in place. I think that it also comes back to the idea that in transport research we've been so obsessed with wanting to model things, with wanting to place some kind of order over what is a really messy realm, that we've simplified the trips rather than complicating the way that we look at them. And it's very sort of alluring and seductive to kind of think about the traveling public as being quite simple in their lifestyles, but it's obviously not working in the way that we want people to transition and I think we've really got to really knock ourselves out of that way of thinking. We're getting there, I think. I mean, that whole push towards conceptualising accessibility is a big component of it, but we need to go deeper still, I think, in the long term if we're going to do the change that needs to happen.
Jeff Wood:And the fourth one is the transitory nature of childhood, children growing up and getting more abilities, which may or may not mean less or more travel for them or independent travel for them, the changing grades, you know, going to different schools, those types of things, and so you know, through the 18 year journey that you described earlier, there's sub journeys in the 18 years right, and so those sub journeys have different transport needs as you move through the life of a child.
Jennifer Kent:Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a really interesting thing to dig deeper into because often we I mean there's research on mobility, biographies and so forth, but that's always really long term stuff and we like to think that once a person has made a decision about the way they will travel, that that will be ingrained and trenched. But with families that changes from, you know, year to year, week to week, day to day, like I said before, hour to hour sometimes, and so at every stage of that we need to be pushing for the sustainable transport option over the private car, and that again just is such a complex task to be able to do that. One thing I'm really interested in is the way that the car sort of becomes entrenched in family life because it was relevant to one particular aspect. So, you know, a family might have been able to be car free, like I was saying before, up until the child hits that period of time when they're interested in extracurricular activities. They've got family, they've got friends all over the place that they want to visit.
Jennifer Kent:So the car becomes more important and what I think happens is, because the car is such a useful tool, it becomes entrenched in the family's routine even after that period where the child is dependent on the car for mobility. So the child may become more independent, but the car stays in the family because it's become such an important tool in the way that that family works. And then, even when the child may move out of home, the couple finds themselves more car dependent than what they were before parenthood because they've got used to the autonomy and the flexibility and so forth that the car can bring them. So again, there's all these sort of intervention points that I don't think we really take account of when we're thinking about the way that people might travel throughout their entire lives.
Jeff Wood:That's so interesting because, as you're talking about that, I'm just thinking about the sunk cost of a car. Right, you purchase a vehicle, whether it's a used one or a new one it's a significant investment 10 to 20 to $30,000. And maybe even more, depending on your station, life and how much you feel like you can afford it. And then, as you go through those stages where you actually did need it, you actually find yourself maybe using it for other things, that it's just there, so you use it for it, but maybe you didn't do that before. Like you said, I just think that's interesting as an inflection point for determining whether you can use sustainable transportation or not, or whether you will, or your choice to.
Jeff Wood:If you have a car sitting on the street and it's just sitting there and you feel like you need to use it, maybe it's like, oh well, I need to make sure that I run the engine once a week, so let's go to get dinner or something like that, right?
Jeff Wood:Yeah, one of the reasons I got rid of my car was because I kept on leaving it and getting parking tickets and the clutch was going bad and I was like, well, the dawn of Zipcar and Uber and all those other things and I was like, well, I think I could do this as a single person living my own life, but I can imagine if you decided another way, to get another car because you needed it, because you had a kid or something along those lines. That car stays with you for 10 to 15 years, and so it's that purchase and this is part of the problem with the climate change transition too is, you know, the gas powered vehicle that people are buying now, instead of maybe an electric vehicle? That's a 10 year time period that that vehicle is going to be a gas powered vehicle rather than a transition to a cleaner vehicle. So it's interesting, those decision points that you were talking about.
Jennifer Kent:Yeah, absolutely.
Jennifer Kent:I mean a couple of things sort of come up for me, as you were talking, I think, where the car sits there, and so you feel like you need to use it, or the car sits there and you get really accustomed to the autonomy that it can bring and you kind of lose your skills of being able to plan a little bit ahead that you know more sustainable transport might require.
Jennifer Kent:I think that's why car sharing schemes work so well is because it makes every single trip a real decision point, not just something that becomes automated or out of habit, and that's a lot to do with the success in car sharing and reducing VKT or VMT and reducing car ownership.
Jennifer Kent:The other thing that came to mind, though, there's this sociologist, margaret Archer, who thinks of this concept of transitions to sustainability through that temporal sort of the lens, and she's got this great quote, and I can't sort of roll it off off the top of my head. It's sort of saying that we can sit here planning for an outcome that we're after well, all the way putting in policies that are actually doing the exact opposite thing, and it just draws out that idea that there's this temporal lag. I think of the way that we think about climate change, the way that we think about other aspects of sustainability and the policies that we're actually putting in place or the practices on a personal level that we're actually doing. And I worry about that because we're running out of time. We need to start getting things happening sooner, but this nature of the temporal lag, these investments that are 15 years, like you say, of cementing you into a certain way of travelling, become really costly when you think about it in that way.
Jeff Wood:Yeah, over time it adds up, especially if it's a decade time period. That's such a long time. It's not a year or two years.
Jennifer Kent:No, it becomes really. The thing that we haven't really talked about is this idea of travel socialisation with children as well, that the investment of a car isn't just for 10 years. You're actually socialising the child into that expectation of the autonomy that comes with the car and de-skilling them with taking public transport, using bikes and walking and so forth. So the temporal implications of that is augmented generation after generation. That's how we've ended up where we are, I think.
Jeff Wood:There's been studies on that right, like about how kids who are driven to school versus kids who walk to school are not as good at figuring out where they are location using maps, that type of thing. Because of it, I remember when I was a kid I walked to school every day and then when I moved to Houston outside of Houston, I bike to school every day and so a lot of the neighbourhoods that I was in and in running too we talked about this last time, but I ran cross-country and track in high school and college and that actually gave me a spatial awareness of the cities that I lived in and the places that I was on a street-by-street basis, and I feel like if you're just driving around, you miss it. You know, you know the roads you're supposed to go on, but you don't have an intimate feel for the neighbourhoods and the areas that you're in.
Jennifer Kent:There has been a lot of really interesting research on that done with children.
Jennifer Kent:There was this one particular study that's come into mind where they got children who were driven to school and children who walked to school to do a diary of their journey, and the depth of colour that the children who walked to school could describe their walk to school in was just so much different to those who were driven, who sort of talked more about the fast pace and the idea of things splashing past the window, whereas the children who walked to school spoke about little bugs that they found on the way or even avoiding the cracks in the footpath.
Jennifer Kent:It was just such a more grounded experience. I mean, I do want to preface that by saying to be able to walk to school in many areas is actually a real privilege. You know, it's not something that you know. I don't think people drive their kids to school necessarily by choice. I think often it's just necessity. But I think that children's mobility to school is such a great place to start in terms of embedding those skills and appreciations of ways of travelling that are a little bit slower and a little bit more grounded.
Jeff Wood:So these four areas of familial travel get you also into ways that you can explore the ways that people can change their behaviors and you talk about it in the book in ways that people can become less car dependent, and that's by A using other modes of transportation and then B maybe traveling less. And I'm interested in the ways that this takes you in your research, in thinking about how people travel, but then how you can use that to think about the ways to travel without cars.
Jennifer Kent:Yeah, I mean I think that was.
Jennifer Kent:I don't know whether it's revolutionary for anybody else but it was quite revolutionary for me to sort of go okay, so the way that we're going to challenge the private car, we either need to get people traveling differently or we just need to get them to travel less. And when you boil it down to that kind of simplicity, it opens up all sorts of space for complexity. I think. So in transport research we've concentrated very much on facilitating the existing journeys that people do by other modes, so trying to get people out of cars onto bikes, onto public transit and so forth, and so we haven't thought as much, nearly as much, about how we can actually call into question the need for people to travel. So if you start to look at that, that's where the idea of concentrating on people's practices and the outcomes that they're actually after when it comes to travel can be so powerful and challenging private car use and I go through a series in the paper of different ways that we might do this, and the most obvious one is densification, where we have critical mass of people to justify investment in transit and bike infrastructure and better footpaths and so forth. We bring users closer together and that basically negates a lot of the need to travel long distances. But there's also a lot of other ways that I think we can call into question this need to travel, and one of the more interesting ones that I really want to explore into the future is this idea of the over-scheduled child. So we have this very deep seated, coming back to that ethical sort of sanctioning of the partiality of care, this deep seated need to provide every opportunity possible for our child, and I think that's been really augmented by the kind of economic, rationalist, competitive society that we've become. We definitely want to make sure our child has access to the best thoughts that we can provide, the best mass coaching that we can provide and that really generates a whole lot of travel. If we can start to call into question that need for our child to be scheduled, for every second of their lives to be scheduled, we could start to provide more space for children to have more free play and more free opportunities that don't necessarily involve getting in the car to get there.
Jennifer Kent:There are other ways that I think are really under explored that we could do this. So, for example, instead of a child driving to mass coaching, they might be able to do online mass coaching via Zoom and so forth, and I'm very interested in conceptualising that as a different form of children's independent mobility, because it gives the child the independence from the transport of the parent to get them there. And I think there's other ways in terms of trying to make children's lives more localised. I think that the school as a hub is very important in that and that brings up the whole realm of school choice. That I'm not sure about in the US, but in Australia we've seen this massive increase in people wanting to choose the schools that they send their child to rather than just relying on the local school, and that just really has a huge capacity to add to the transport task of the child, not only by the journey to school but, when you think about it, the child's friendship circles are all going to be located around that school, so you're really locking the child into a lot of travel in their day to day lives.
Jennifer Kent:So there's lots of different, I think, intervention points that become open when we start to really call into question the need to travel and I think for lots of different reasons, transport planners and transport researchers have been a bit scared around that idea of questioning well, do you really need to do this trip? Because it starts to impinge on that individual right that I think that we're very scared to question from the perspective of a mere transport planner. But I think we need to start to do that. I mean, that's kind of what's required if we're going to start to face some of the challenges that are ahead of us.
Jeff Wood:Two thoughts on that specifically. The first one I have is I was challenged on this maybe a couple of weeks ago, maybe a couple of months ago on if you think about your trips and the ones that you're not taking, does that mean that somebody else has to take a trip, like an Amazon trip or something along those lines? Yeah, Is that trip still exist even if you're not taking it? And the second one is kind of what Greg and Jonathan were talking about, in the sense that maybe there are some things that we've learned from the pandemic and from the work from home for white collar workers, mostly that it's something that could be possible that people could take less trips, because before everybody talked about work from home or telework or whatever else and they said, oh well, this could be the future. But until there was kind of this force change, nobody really took it seriously.
Jennifer Kent:Yeah, I mean, I really loved I can't remember whether it was Greg or Jonathan who said we got pushed forward 40 years, or something like that, by the pan in our embrace of working from home. I think that it definitely has a lot of possibilities, and there's definitely this idea that these things become more realistic. What worries me, though, is that, for goodness sake, a two global pandemic to get happening, and somebody said to me the other day what's it going to take to get a sustainable transport transition, and the first thing that came to mind was, oh my gosh, like nine more pandemics, and we might actually get there.
Jennifer Kent:We need to start being a little bit more proactive than reactive if we're going to really get to where we need to go, if we're going to combat things like climate change. I think it's just. It's so interesting that that is what it took to just get what should have been a really incremental sort of smaller change. Like you said, we've been talking about it for years. It took that to get us to actually do it. It just it amazes me.
Jeff Wood:I remember my geography professor in college, in undergrad and in the late nineties, early 2000s, talking about the death of distance right.
Jeff Wood:The telework revolution and all that stuff, and that was 20 plus years ago and it's been going on longer than that. You mentioned the over scheduled child as well, and I personally hate being an over scheduled adult, so I can't imagine how the kids feel. As someone who was more than happy as a kid to be at home and playing with Legos versus going out and doing other things, so that speaks to me as well as an adult Cause I feel like if I have stuff that's scheduled, it's almost anxiety inducing versus doing things on a day because I feel like I want to do it.
Jennifer Kent:Yeah, I mean, we think about it the last time that children with this scheduled, you know, when you think about a child who perhaps is starting their day at seven o'clock with a music lesson, then going to school and then having mass coaching and then perhaps a birthday party or something after that.
Jennifer Kent:Children have not been this set, this schedule, since the 18th century, where we were sending them into sweatshops and getting them to work. That was when they had 12 hour days and now they've got 12 hour days again. We don't think that that could actually be harming the child. This kind of drive that we have to ensure that they're competitive in the workplace and, you know, they get into the best colleges or or whatever, we don't think that that could actually be really harming them. I mean, the step beyond that is we definitely don't think that that is a transport problem. Yeah, but if we use like it's, it's just so interesting to think about the policy areas and the cultural areas that are relevant to transport are just so much more than the way we provide a road or a train line or whatever.
Jeff Wood:Well, so then let's talk about another aspect of relationship and the lack of them, and that's the idea of loneliness. The first thing I think of when I think of loneliness is how social humans are and how we are all social animals. No matter how introverted I am, I still do need to have human contact. I still need to see my friends, not so begrudgingly.
Jeff Wood:It's the scheduled thing. I wish to choose the times when I can do it rather than being chosen for. I guess is the difference. So, as social animals, I think that there is something to be said about the loneliness epidemic and the drivers of it as well, but it's also seen, as you mentioned in the conversation article it's also seen as an individual problem and I'm wondering why it's focused on as an individual problem versus about society, about the built environment, about more than just a personal thing.
Jennifer Kent:Yeah, I mean I suppose it speaks to the way we treat a lot of health issues right.
Jennifer Kent:So loneliness, like you said, it is described as an epidemic by a lot of psychologists and a lot of other professionals working in that space because it's becoming such a commonly diagnosed experience for people.
Jennifer Kent:It can be diagnosed using diagnostic criteria that is similarly used to diagnose depression, anxiety and so forth. I mean, there's so many of health issues that we treat at the problem rather than the source, and we're treating loneliness once it's actually being diagnosed rather than treating the things that determine loneliness. So people will present with loneliness to a psychologist or a psychiatrist and they'll be treated as an individual, whereas the things that actually cause loneliness there is a lack of social interaction, a lack of social connection, a lack of belonging in the space where you live. We don't think that that is actually what we need to tackle when we're tackling loneliness. So it's kind of characteristic of our health systems all around the world, where we should actually be calling them sick care systems, because we're only interested in looking after people once they're sick, we're not interested in preventing them from getting ill in the first place, and loneliness, I think, has been exactly the same.
Jeff Wood:It reminds me of a discussion I had with Dr Mindy Full of where she was talking about.
Jeff Wood:She wrote a book called Root Shock, which is basically about people who leave communities and they totally kind of lose their footing because the community was the place where they were the most centered, where they were themselves, where they had the connections to the neighborhood, to the family. Her discussion about that is based on not a clinical model of social interaction but more and I'm probably butchering this a little bit but thinking about it from the social determinants of health aspect that you're talking about, which is the overall impact of the neighborhood and the place where you live and how that impacts your health outcome, versus just going to the hospital and the doctor tells you oh well, you have this, we need to treat it with this going deeper into that kind of that neighborhood level of impact. I think that's really a good way to think about it, because loneliness is one of those things where it's that root shock level, it's that thing that goes deeper into the societal connections than maybe from that individual level.
Jennifer Kent:Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of the things that really combat loneliness is social interaction, and there's different ways of thinking about social interaction. So you have interactions with the people who you're close to you have interactions with a wider group of friends.
Jennifer Kent:But there's these things called incidental social interactions, which are the tiny little things that just occur when you're out and about in your neighborhood. You might walk past the same person every now and again and you give them a little wave or a nod. You might be down in your local park and you have a smile or a moment of eye contact. Those incidental social interactions are actually just as important for combating loneliness, because they make you feel like you belong in the place where you live. They make you feel like you have a sense of connection to that place and a sense of support in that place. And what we've found? That as our neighborhoods have become more private, as we're all running around in our private cars, traveling straight through our suburbs and our neighborhoods rather than actually engaging with them, those incidental social interactions are really starting to erode.
Jennifer Kent:And that's one of the reasons that we're having this epidemic, I think, of loneliness. I think the other thing is that people are feeling quite disconnected from having a say over what is happening in their neighborhoods. So a big component of a sense of belonging is having that sense of control of what goes on, if you feel like your neighborhood is just being planned top down, so it's being planned for, rather than with the community, that sense of belonging again gets really eroded. And I think, talking of the shock of COVID, I think that just really brought it out to us that we are really feeling quite disconnected from the place where we live because we were forced to spend a lot of time in that place during COVID. So I think again we've just kind of had that shock brought out and that's why we're seeing this massive increase in loneliness now.
Jeff Wood:So what made you all I mean basically it looks like you all did like this really intensive literature review of what has been said before about loneliness and the built environment. But I'm curious how much did you have to dig through and did it come out to be what you expected versus maybe something that was surprising in the results?
Jennifer Kent:Yeah, it's really interesting because for me that was a really intense experience of working in an interdisciplinary team. So the paper itself was initiated by the psychology department at the University of Sydney who were working in a centre for mental health called the Matilda Centre and they were very interested in the social determinants of health model and that's where they got in contact with me as an urban planner and a transport planner to sort of look at the way that urban planning might impact mental health, with a specific focus on loneliness. So I mean, I say it was such an intensely interdisciplinary experience of working as a team because we came to the table and found that we had totally different definitions of really basic things.
Jennifer Kent:Like you mentioned, the definition of the built environment that we used in the paper, that took days and days and days of working for months to really come to definition and a lot of just going back to basics and me explaining what I felt as a planner and as an urban designer, was the built environment. What psychologists felt was the environment that surrounded their patients and the people that they work with, and it was a really deep experience of trying to unpick some of that complexity and some of the misunderstandings that I think so often characterise our research. And it was only when we really sat down and started to work through that that those things came out. I think that the psychologists for them, the results were actually really surprising because what they wanted and this so often happens with research on health in the built environment or health and transport they wanted something really clean cut, because they used to working with randomised control trials as being the gold standard of evidence, right, whereas urban planners we're used to sort of saying, oh yeah, well, this kind of will work, and then we've got to take into account politics and regulation and engineering and so forth, so we're a lot more accustomed to working with something a little bit messier. So they were surprised because they didn't find this clean cut definition of what kind of built environment is going to discourage people from experiencing loneliness. They wanted something really standard. They almost wanted sort of design guidelines as to a built environment that prevents loneliness.
Jennifer Kent:But what we found is that it's just so contextual and we use this theory of affordance to be able to explain that in that the built environment affords people opportunities for social interactions but it doesn't necessarily produce those opportunities.
Jennifer Kent:There's so much that needs to go on between the structure and the agency of the individual who is within that environment to bring forward those social interactions. So for me it was just confirming the way that I'd always really thought about the links between built environment and health and its contextual, and it's very difficult to pin down, and that all of the best way that we're going to be able to work in that space is just to jump into that mess. But for the psychologists I think it was a bit of a surprise, which was just another layer to the complexity of interdisciplinary working. That whole paper, by the way, took it's been about three and a half years in the making and I think there's been three children born in that period. It's been a global pandemic. It was just this juggernaut and when it finally got across the line, we're all so happy. Yeah, I can imagine.
Jennifer Kent:Yeah, it's good to have an opportunity to speak about it.
Jeff Wood:Yeah, I mean it's just so interesting because you know you hear about things that happen and then I always like to bring them back to that discussion about the built environment or transportation or urban planning more generally. And as you said, it isn't like the engineers or like we might want sometimes, where you can put a bunch of numbers into a black box and get an answer.
Jeff Wood:It's actually much messier than that. One of the things that was really interesting is thinking about the geography right that you're talking about. When you're talking about the built environment, there's no real relation between city or region or density as it pertains to loneliness, but it's more of your home situation or your neighborhood, and that built environment discussion kind of comes into play. And so I think those types of things, I think it makes sense to us as planners who have dealt with these things for a really long time. Everything the mess that you talk about is the mess that we deal with within all the time. Yeah, but I think it's really interesting also to start to think is there a connection between these things and whether it is an individual's responsibility to take advantage of the built environment that it's afforded to them?
Jeff Wood:If you live in New York City and you're lonely, there's opportunities to go out or go to museums or whatever it is, but you can't make people do something that they maybe don't want to do or they are not up for or there's other circumstances. So I think that's just a really interesting wrinkle. The other interesting wrinkle for me was thinking about the home and how some of the specific findings from the review. So if your home is too small and we have this real fascination now with tiny houses and micro apartments and those types of things if your home is too small, you might not feel like you can invite people over to have a drink or have dinner large groups, those types of things. Also, if you're a renter, you may not be comfortable decorating your place. For me personally, I've decorated my rooms ever since I lived at home.
Jeff Wood:I had no white space on my wall at home and drove my parents mad, probably because of all the push pins that were in the wall. But even you can see behind me I have maps and I have transit paraphernalia and I have other things, so decorating my space is really important. So I think that's interesting too, in that if somebody feels like they can't make a space their own, that makes them feel less connected and maybe a little bit more lonely, and so those types of things I think were interesting findings that came out of the report.
Jennifer Kent:Yeah, I mean I think we probably don't place enough emphasis in the literature and the research on health and the built environment.
Jennifer Kent:We probably don't place enough emphasis on the actual home environment there are architects working in that space but just that idea of being able to personalise your own space again it comes back to that sense of belonging and that sense of what is, that sense of permanency that people, I think, need to feel like they are okay in a space.
Jennifer Kent:That idea of inviting people over for dinner I think brings up a really interesting point where we're constantly intentioned as people, between having this desire for privacy but also this overwhelming desire for connection, and that in itself I think that comes back to the private car as well is we want to connect with people and we want to be in the public realm, but we also want those opportunities to be able to retreat and be within our own private realm.
Jennifer Kent:And if we're living in a space that is so small or a space that is not very nice, not very well maintained, not comfortable, and we're constantly forced to go out and about to live our lives, then we don't have that opportunity to get that retreat and that privacy which I think is the flip side of the social interactions and you can't have one without the other. You can't be forced into constantly having to interact because you're not comfortable at home. Likewise, you can't be forced into sort of living in your private domain. They both need each other for people to thrive. So I think that's it's a really interesting concept, looking at the intricacies of the built environment.
Jeff Wood:So what's next? What's the next research focus for you? You have the loneliness research, the familial travel. I imagine they'll come together as a force, together at some point.
Jennifer Kent:Well, I suppose, because my research all looks at those three points of transport health, built environment so I'm constantly flipping between those three things and I guess the health and built environment was what came out with the loneliness piece. I am more concentrating on that family travel aspect and that's what I'm going to be taking into the future. This year I'm doing this massive wave. I don't know how I'm going to get through it. I've interviewed with parents at all different stages of the parents and journey and with all different contexts, just to try and pick some of that complexity a little bit more.
Jennifer Kent:I'm also working with a researcher from Swansea University on this concept of motor normativity. He was on a podcast, the Warren podcast, recently, and so we're going to be looking at transposing that concept of motor normativity, which is basically this idea that as a society we have a bias towards automobility, towards private car use. I'm going to be transposing that onto parents, which I think will be really interesting. That's definitely work in progress. There's something I'm really excited about, because it's just a bit of fun really.
Jeff Wood:All your work sounds fun. That's why we keep having you back on the show, because it's so fascinating all the stuff that you're doing.
Jennifer Kent:Oh, thank you, that means a lot Thanks.
Jeff Wood:I can find your work if they want to get copies of the papers or find out more about what you're doing.
Jennifer Kent:Good question, jeff. I'm really hopeless with social media and I need to get better, and I sort of a week before the whole Elon Musk Twitter thing happened, I made this resolution to become a lot better with Twitter and put in these plans, and then that happened and now I'm a bit lost. So I still have my Twitter account at Jennifer Lee Kent and I still do tweet things, but I also regularly try to publish whatever I do in scholarly papers. I always try to put a complimentary piece in the conversation, so that's another way to keep track of what I'm doing. Or people can just email me. If you look up Jennifer Lee Kent, university of Sydney, you'll definitely find my email address and I'm more than willing to hear from people who are interested in my work or interested in similar topics. So definitely open to hearing from folks Awesome.
Jeff Wood:Well, Jennifer, thanks for joining us again. We really appreciate your time.
Jennifer Kent:Thanks a lot, Jeff. It's really enjoyable.