Beat of Your Own Drummer? the Entanglement of Time and the Embodied Witness in 87 Capital Cities

The human sensorium and our experiences of time are intimately interdependent and intertwined. Time is additionally an integral, deterministic component of the social world, palpable through our collective pace of life. Pace matters, as our conception of temporality itself springs from our encounters with, and traversing of, space. There has been a long-standing interest in measuring this pace, as it allows us to glimpse what it means to experience time as it is embodied differently in different contexts, constrained both by the infrastructure of urban spaces and by our individual, gendered biological trajectories through life. In this paper, by using the latest live stream video technologies, I build and improve upon the existing measures of the pace of life. In addition to expanding the data from the previously measured 31 to 87 cities, I standardize the measure for greater accuracy, while also taking gender and age in consideration. My contribution extends beyond the descriptive. As the pace of life is multifaceted, with technological, economic and social drivers, I examine how country-level population characteristics along with socioeconomic drivers influence this pace. Moving from macro to micro: to illuminate how time influences our biological temporal rhythms - through an examination of the relationship between temporality, fertility, birth spacing, and health - I also touch on the ways in which the pace of life interacts with the constitution of humanity through space and time.