Places in motion : the diurnal dynamics of visitor populations in the Netherlands. In a network society, as a result of technological, economic, demographic and cultural developments, individual activity and travel patterns have fragmented in space and time. The fragmentations will have a large impact on the use of places and spaces by visitors. To date, insight into the impact of a large variety of urban, suburban and rural areas on the presence of visitors is lacking. The aim of this study was twofold: first, to unravel some of the complexity and dynamics in the presence of temporary populations by identifying the most important dimensions underlying diurnal weekday variations in visitor populations in Dutch municipalities; second, to examine the degree in which these dimensions express themselves in different spatial contexts during different times of day. Using the 1998 Netherlands National Travel Survey, for six representative one-hour time periods, we performed an exploratory factor analysis to capture the underlying dimensions. The solution comprised one dimension referring to participation in activities, two dimensions related to the size of the territory in which visitor populations operate combined with the use of different transport modes, one dimension expressing the direction in which inter-local movement occurs, and three dimensions capturing different life stages within the visitor population. (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting