Inferring urban polycentricity from the variability in human mobility patterns (original) (raw)

Revealing centrality in the spatial structure of cities from human activity patterns

Urban Studies, 2016

Identifying changes in the spatial structure of cities is a prerequisite for the development and validation of adequate planning strategies. Nevertheless, current methods of measurement are becoming ever more challenged by the highly diverse and intertwined ways of how people actually make use of urban space. Here, we propose a new quantitative measure for the centrality of locations, taking into account not only the numbers of people attracted to different locations, but also the diversity of the activities they are engaged in. This ‘centrality index’ allows for the identification of functional urban centres and for a systematic tracking of their relative importance over time, thus contributing to our understanding of polycentricity. We demonstrate the proposed index using travel survey data in Singapore for different years between 1997 and 2012. It is shown that, on the one hand, the city-state has been developing rapidly towards a polycentric urban form that compares rather close...

A tale of many cities: universal patterns in human urban mobility

2011

The advent of geographic online social networks such as Foursquare, where users voluntarily signal their current location, opens the door to powerful studies on human movement. In particular the fine granularity of the location data, with GPS accuracy down to 10 meters, and the worldwide scale of Foursquare adoption are unprecedented. In this paper we study urban mobility patterns of people in several metropolitan cities around the globe by analyzing a large set of Foursquare users.

From centre to centres: polycentric structures in individual mobility

2021

The availability of large-scale datasets collected via mobile phones has opened up opportunities to study human mobility at an individual level. The granular nature of these datasets calls for the design of summary statistics that can be used to describe succinctly mobility patterns. In this work, we show that the radius of gyration, a popular summary statistic to quantify the extent of an individual’s whereabouts, suffers from a sensitivity to outliers, and is incapable of capturing mobility organised around multiple centres. We propose a natural generalisation of the radius of gyration to a polycentric setting, as well as a novel metric to assess the quality of its description. With these notions, we propose a method to identify the centres in an individual’s mobility and apply it to two large mobility datasets with socio-demographic features, showing that a polycentric description can capture features that a monocentric model is incapable of. The availability of individual-level ...

Modeling the polycentric transition of cities

Empirical evidence suggests that most urban systems experience a transition from a monocentric to a polycentric organization as they grow and expand. We propose here a stochastic, out-of-equilibrium model of the city, which explains the appearance of subcenters as an effect of traffic congestion. We show that congestion triggers the instability of the monocentric regime and that the number of subcenters and the total commuting distance within a city scale sublinearly with its population, predictions that are in agreement with data gathered for around 9000 U.S. cities between 1994 and 2010.