ABSTRACT
Research on the interactions between travel behaviour and land use is relatively abundant. Furthermore, research on the interactions between travel behaviour and social networks emerged in last years. In contrast, the existence of studies that combines both is much rarer. Therefore, the main objective of this chapter is to review studies that looked at the influences of social networks and the urban environment. More specifically, we look at literature that provides evidence regarding the constraints and opportunities posed by social networks and the relationship with the urban environment. After all, the activity based approach and the use of behavioural theories from social psychology (e.g Azjen’s theory of planned behaviour) include in their considerations both social and spatial interactions that could act either as restrictions, incentives or even substitutes of travel. The contributions of the review are twofold. First, the inclusion of key works that are scattered across different research domains, provide a transversal perspective on this topic. Second, a framework of the relations between travel behaviour, social networks and built environment is built, based both on previous theoretical contributions and on empirical results.
