Understanding activity spaces: Contemporary issues and challenges and future research directions

Activity spaces are a subset of locations where people spend their everyday lives. Interest in activity spaces spans the social sciences, geography, health sciences and transportation research. In recent years, the spread of smartphones and other tracking devices has made it far easier to record daily movements. This has sparked an increase in activity space research and an opportunity to consider how the concept has been conceptually and empirically defined over time and across disciplinary fields. In this scoping review, we analyse 372 studies of activity spaces published between 1972 and 2024. Despite conceptual consistency, we find that studies tend to focus, empirically, on one of four dimensions of activity spaces: access, nodes, paths and exposure. Drawing on our review, we suggest greater methodological harmonisation may better support replication and comparative studies and incremental research discovery. We propose that to achieve this, a more nuanced theoretical framework is required that defines each of the dimensions of activity space, how they are related to each other and incorporates aspects of daily activity in the new millennia (e.g. online, hybrid and multilayered time–space locations).