Chapter 3: Children and Urban Mobility: Care Dynamics on Family Mobility Patterns

Access can be understood as the spatial dimension of social inclusion and exclusion. It is from this understanding that the authors incorporate the gender perspective when analysing the possibilities of mobility in the city. This research focusses on a specific moment in the life cycle of men and women: childbirth and the presence of children in the household. The aim is to elucidate how much the presence of children in the household impacts the urban mobility of the people responsible for the household, comparing data of men and women responsible for households with or without cohabiting children. The authors used descriptive statistics and correlation analysis based on data from the Origin–Destination Survey 2012 of Belo Horizonte, Brazil. The authors analysed the travel motivations, the ratio of journeys by trips and the means of transportation used, in addition to some indicators of immobility. The results of the research show the impact of the presence of children in an unequal way considering the gender of those responsible for the household, with women in all scenarios carrying out a greater frequency of trips associated with care, but in a specific way according to their degree of schooling and their children’s ages.