In many parts of Europe, including Italy, debates on territorial inequality tend to focus on employment opportunities, income disparities, or population decline. Yet these perspectives often overlook a fundamental dimension of inequality: how people organise and experience their daily time. A closer look at everyday life in so-called “inner areas” suggests that mobility, access to services, and care responsibilities are deeply intertwined, with important implications for both wellbeing and gender equality.

Within this framework, commuting emerges as a crucial dimension. For residents of peripheral and disadvantaged areas, commuting is not simply a routine activity but a structural necessity. Limited local job opportunities and uneven access to essential services—such as healthcare, education, and transport—require individuals to travel longer distances to meet basic needs. While daily mobility enables people to remain in their communities, it also imposes significant time costs.

Time, however, is not a neutral resource. Decades of feminist research have consistently shown that its distribution is highly unequal. Women continue to bear a disproportionate share of unpaid care and domestic work, shaping not only how much time they have available, but also how constrained and fragmented their daily schedules become. Understanding territorial inequality therefore requires examining how commuting interacts with these gendered patterns of time use.

Drawing on data from the Italian Time Use Survey, our study adopts a time-centred approach to analyse the relationship between commuting, gender, and subjective wellbeing. Time-use data offer a distinct advantage: they make it possible to reconstruct daily life in detail, capturing the sequencing and duration of activities across paid work, unpaid care, mobility, and leisure. This perspective allows us to move beyond aggregate indicators and to observe how structural constraints are experienced in practice.

A key analytical contribution is the distinction between different dimensions of wellbeing. On the one hand, evaluative wellbeing refers to overall life satisfaction; on the other, experienced wellbeing captures how individuals feel during specific activities, including commuting. This distinction is essential for understanding the patterns that emerge across territorial contexts.

A first important result is that living in inner areas is not associated with lower overall wellbeing. On the contrary, residents of these areas often report levels of life satisfaction that are comparable to—or even higher than—those observed in more accessible urban contexts. This finding challenges conventional narratives of territorial disadvantage. Despite more limited access to services and infrastructure, inner areas may offer other elements that support wellbeing, such as stronger social ties, lower congestion, or different expectations regarding time use. In this sense, place-based disadvantages do not translate mechanically into lower subjective wellbeing.

However, this apparent advantage becomes less clear when we shift attention from general life evaluations to the organisation of daily life. Across all territorial contexts, longer commuting times are associated with lower satisfaction with work–life balance and leisure time, as well as higher levels of perceived time pressure. These effects highlight how commuting shapes the allocation of time across daily activities, reducing the space available for rest, social interaction, and care.

In inner areas, these dynamics take on particular significance. In fact, limited services accessibility and weaker infrastructure may increase the effective time costs of mobility. As a result, commuting becomes a key channel through which territorial disadvantage is translated into everyday constraints. The impact of these constraints is not uniform. Time-use data clearly show persistent gender inequalities in the allocation of unpaid care and domestic work. Women devote substantially more time to these activities than men, resulting in tighter time constraints and more complex daily schedules.

In this context, commuting is embedded within a broader set of responsibilities. Women are more likely to engage in multi-purpose trips and to combine mobility with care-related tasks, leading to more fragmented and demanding daily routines. Consequently, commuting generates higher levels of time pressure and has stronger negative effects on specific dimensions of wellbeing. While gender differences in overall life satisfaction remain relatively limited, women consistently report lower satisfaction with work–life balance and greater feelings of being rushed, particularly as commuting demands increase.

The most significant insight of the analysis emerges from the interaction between gender, commuting, and territorial context. Although inner areas are associated with relatively high levels of overall wellbeing, this advantage is not equally distributed. When commuting is taken into account, the wellbeing surplus observed in inner areas tends to diminish. For women in particular, it is substantially reduced and, in some cases, effectively cancelled out. Longer or more demanding commuting patterns intensify time constraints and reduce satisfaction with work–life balance and leisure, offsetting the positive aspects of living in these areas.

This finding points to a crucial dynamic: territorial advantages can coexist with, and be undermined by, gendered time inequalities. For women in inner areas, the combination of limited service provision, mobility demands, and unequal care responsibilities results in a form of time scarcity that directly affects daily wellbeing.

Overall, these results suggest that territorial inequality cannot be fully understood through standard economic indicators alone. A time-use perspective reveals how structural conditions—such as accessibility and infrastructure—interact with the unequal distribution of unpaid care work to shape everyday experiences. Unpaid care work is central in this respect. It structures how time is allocated within households and mediates the impact of commuting and mobility constraints. Where public services and infrastructure are limited, the burden of care intensifies, reinforcing existing gender inequalities. Commuting, in turn, operates as a key mechanism linking spatial disadvantage to individual wellbeing. Its effects are not uniform but depend on how it intersects with gender roles and daily time allocation.

By foregrounding time, care, and everyday practices, this analysis highlights the importance of looking beyond where people live to understand how they live. Such an approach is essential for capturing the lived experience of inequality and for recognising the central role of care in shaping both wellbeing and the sustainability of places.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Image credit: Amebar Studio (Amebar) / Dreamstime.com