Liu, Liu and Mostafavi displace environmental exposure from the residential address to the moving body. Their iconic idea is that hazard is encountered through daily trajectories, dwell times and recurrent destinations, producing latent exposure far beyond officially classified neighbourhoods. The theoretical contribution is a relational account of environmental risk in which vulnerability emerges from the coupling of spatial concentration and mobility patterns rather than from location alone. Methodologically, large-scale mobility traces are integrated with air pollution, heat and toxic-site data across 239 United States counties to construct a mobility-based exposure index. This operation reveals “environmental hazard traps”, where movement does not diversify risk but repeatedly channels populations through hazardous zones, and it quantifies the systematic underestimation produced by residence-only models. The wider bridge reaches time geography, transport justice, epidemiology and critical GIS: the city appears not as a mosaic of stable areas but as a field of unequal circulations whose infrastructures distribute harm across both visible and administratively concealed populations.
URBANISM MEETS ART