Mobility practices and mobile phone data

Abstract

This chapter introduces the debate on the role of spatial mobility in describing and assessing urban changes. In accordance with the practice in an established literature, the role of mobility will be discussed as a key for describing the forms and the extent of different life practices and consumption patterns, producing diversified uses of the city. This is a necessary framework for an understanding of the challenges that the new data sources—such as mobile phone data— have to meet in order to interpret users’ practices and behaviours, described in the realm of mobility. In fact, descriptions of the different social dimensions highlighted by mobility practices call for new empirical and analytical approaches, able to better capture people’s movements, variation in them over time and space, and the multisited nature of the activities. In this context, we will investigate the contribution that tracking technologies and mobile phone network data have to offer. Because analysis of the space-time variability of urban practices is difficult to achieve with traditional data sources, our focus will be on the opportunities and limits of mobile phone data in mapping the spatial dimension and the density of use of the city and its services.