ABSTRACT
This chapter is a speculative attempt to contribute to an integrated geographical approach to poverty and affluence: one that recognises both the structural determination of poverty by space, time and money and the phenomenological dimension or lived experience of this objective framework. There are political as well as health consequences arising from the commuter's experience of poverty. The physical segregation recorded in the postindustrial geography is matched by a psychological apartheid. The commuter poses a challenge to A. Buttimer's conception of a human geography of place and space as being about ordinary people's experience of the geography which touches the skin in daily doings. Car commuters receive health benefits, whilst at the same time screening themselves from the urban reality of poverty, and contact with poor people, by a strategy of social and geographic insulation. The technical, vehicular prosthesis that commuters use to penetrate the city is the car.
