Irene GÓMEZ VARO, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain
Xavier DELCLÒS-ALIÓ, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Spain
Oriol MARQUET, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain
Carme MIRALLES-GUASCH, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain
In the past years, there has been a growing interest in studying how care operates in urban settings. This has been even more urgent in the context of COVID-19 crisis, which has drawn attention to the sphere of daily life and care. In this line, this work takes the recently coined concept of “mobility of care” by Inés Sánchez de Madariaga (2013), which has helped to visualize a domain of trips that are usually associated with women, mainly related to home and caring tasks, which have frequently been underrepresented in mobility analysis. The aim is to account trips with a care purpose from a quantitative perspective in a Mediterranean urban setting, by using an official household travel survey. We also examine what sociospatial factors are associated with such trips, and what is the use of different transport modes, specifically for the Barcelona Metropolitan Region (BMR). Our results showed that mobility of care is a central component of everyday mobility in the BMR, which is mostly conducted on active modes, above all in dense urban areas. We also found that mobility of care is more frequent among women, increases with age and with the presence of dependent individuals in the household, especially with minors. Lastly, our results indicate that to fully examine mobility of care, such trips cannot be considered as part of an homogeneous category, but instead care-related specific purposes need to be accounted for and interpreted. The insights gained from this study shed light on the relevance of mobility of care and its unequal relationship according to individual, household and territorial characteristics, which may contribute to inform public policies that work to advance towards more inclusive and caring cities.
Mots clés : Mobility of care|Gender mobility|Everyday mobility|trip purposes
A104988IG