No abstract

Discourse on the information society currently highlights issues of networks, flows and mobilities as prime organisers and re-organisers of time-space relationships. Such discourse promotes notions of the flexible use of time and space, of people's decoupling from place and even of the end of geography -the belief that distance does not matter. Yet, in this article we argue that the roles of geographical stationarity and proximity in everyday life -understood as the creation and maintaining of pockets of local order -indicate the continuing and often neglected importance of the friction of distance. We demonstrate this empirically by focusing on the home as a pocket of local order, investigating the intensity and spatial extension of people's everyday activities, projects and contacts -their corporeal, virtual and medial (media-related) mobilities -with the world outside. We support our thesis with data from the population, household and individual levels.

social context) they are performed. We discuss the importance of relating information and feedback to households' everyday activities, in order to make it relevant to households. Through our method we discover and visualize activity patterns in a household during a given period. The method is also useful to households as a reflective tool when discussing families' daily lives in relation to energy consumption. The method gives direct feedback to households and the information is relevant since it emanates from their own reported activities.

The aim of this article is to put Torsten Hägerstrand's contribution to the development of the activity approach in transport geography into the context of his development of time-geography as an integrative ecological world view. This is discussed from a biographical perspective where experiences in his everyday life and scientific investigations are linked into a theoretical whole. The theoretical approach of Hägerstrand can be traced to experiences several years before he presented his time-geographic approach. He studied conditions for individuals' existence in different geographic, social, and ecological contexts by engaging new methods and cross-fertilizing research fields; he developed precise concepts and a notation system general enough to describe any kind of individual and applicable at different levels of aggregation. He combined theoretical and methodological developments in science with active involvement in the Swedish planning model in various sectors, not least urban and transport planning -at the same time as he criticized the fragmentation of society into separate sectors for policy and planning purposes. The article shows that Hägerstrand's early sources of inspiration were in his struggle to develop both a precise and general time-geographic approach. The activity approach in transport research is ingrained in time-geography since the extension of and distance between locations of resources make transport inevitable. Hence, the human needs of transport are generated from activities in people's everyday lives. Hägerstrand's activity approach was developed in an era when transport prognoses based on the development of demand for transportation as such prevailed. Today, the activity approach is a dominant strand in transportation research.

Time-use data (TUD) have a large potential for improving occupancy and load modelling and for introducing realistic behavioural patterns into various simulations. In this article, previously developed models of occupancy, activities and energy use based on TUD are extended and described in a general framework. Two extensions are studied: deterministic conversion of empirical TUD is extended into a complete thermal load model encompassing both occupancy and various end-uses and a Markov-chain approach for generating synthetic TUD sequences is extended to include a model for load management. Three examples of building-related applications are presented: simulation of indoor climate in a low-energy building, household electricity load management in response to timedifferentiated electricity tariffs and simulations of load matching in a net zero energy building. The main conclusion is that the extended model framework can generate detailed and realistic behavioural patterns that allow diversity and correlations between end-uses to be taken into account.