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 multi-sited 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 .
Paola Pucci is the author of this chapter.
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Notes
- 1.
Borrowing from the work of Lefebvre, Amin and Thrift argue that the rhythms of the city are “the coordinates through which inhabitants and visitors frame and order the urban experience” (Amin and Thrift 2002, p. 17).
- 2.
Wenger’s concept (1998) “communities of practice” is employed to focus attention on the fact that urban populations cannot be reduced to predefined and fixed categories due to the phenomenon by which they belong to multiple categories. For this reason it is important to consider populations not as static categories (inhabitants, commuters, city users, etc.), but as “groups of subjects that, temporarily and intermittently, share practices of daily life” (Pasqui 2008, p. 148). Hence they can be considered “communities of practice” that generate particular space-time geographies.
- 3.
Interview with John Urry by Adey and Bussel (2010, p. 2).
- 4.
Sorokin (1927) defines social mobility as “the phenomenon of movements of individuals in the social space” and recognizes two types of movement: vertical mobility that involves a change of position in the social scale; horizontal mobility that defines a change of status or social class, without necessarily implying an evolution in the relative position in the social scale.
- 5.
For a critical analysis see Bourdin (2005) Les mobilités et le programme de la sociologie. Cahiers internationaux de sociologie.118:5–21 e Gallez and Kaufmann (2009) Aux racines de la mobilité en sciences sociales. In: Flonneau M, Guigueno V (eds) De l’histoire des transports à l’histoire de la mobilité? Presses Universitaires de Rennes, pp. 41–55.
- 6.
See Vincent-Geslin and Kaufmann (2012, p. 31).
- 7.
Five interdependent mobilities are (Larsen Axhausen and Urry 2006 p. 263):
∙ Physical travel of people for work, leisure, family life, pleasure, migration;
∙ Physical movement of objects to producers, consumers, retailers;
∙ Imaginative travel, through memories, texts, images, TV, films;
∙ Virtual travel often in real time on the internet, so transcending geographical and social distance;
∙ Communicative travel, through person-to-person messages via letters, postcards, e-mail, text messages, mobile phone.
- 8.
Each context offers a specific field of possibilities with regard to mobility. This receptiveness comprises several ingredients, including: (1) the available networks and their development, performance, and conditions of access (road, highway and railroad networks, airport hubs, and regional telecommunication equipment); (2) space and all of its territorial configurations (urban layout, functional centralities, institutional territories, etc.); (3) the employment market (possibilities for training/employment and the unemployment rate); (4) the institutions and laws that, in different ways, govern human activity (family policies, property/housing assistance, immigration policies, etc.)—in short, all of the social relationships and models of success a society proposes and the trials to which it subjects its various actors in order to succeed (Kaufmann 2014, p. 6).
- 9.
Motility comprises all those factors that determine an actor’s potential to move or be mobile (i.e. physical ability, income, aspirations to move or be sedentary), technical systems (transportation and telecommunication) and their accessibility, and skills acquired through training (holding a driver’s license, command of international English for travel, etc.). Motility therefore comprises factors relative to access (the conditions by which it is possible to use the supply in the broadest sense of the term), skills (those needed to utilize the supply), and appropriation (using the supply to implement personal projects). Thus, motility is the way a person or group appropriates and makes use of the field of possibilities (with regard to movement) and relates to aspirations and plans (Kaufmann 2002).
- 10.
My translation from “la mobilité constitue aussi une technique incontestable de “urbanogenèse” et non un problème externe aux pratiques urbaines les plus fondamentales, c’est à dire à ce qui fait d’une ville une ville, à son urbanité” (Lévy 1999, p. 157).
- 11.
My translation from “cadre transversal de lecture du social” (Bourdin 2005, p. 20).
- 12.
“Groupes sociaux définis à partir de leurs inscriptions territoriales, de leurs pratiques de mobilité, des dispositifs techniques qu’ils mettent en oeuvre” (Le Breton 2006, p. 26).
- 13.
Because “the time of urban populations oscillates and is comprised of cyclical temporalities intertwined with a plurality of uses of spaces and places” (Pasqui 2008), the rhythm of the city can be defined—according to Lefebvre—as “localised time” and “temporalized place”.
- 14.
“Mobile methods” proposed by Sheller and Urry (2006) include: interactional and conversational analysis of people as they move; mobile ethnography involving itinerant movement with people, following objects and co-present immersion in various modes of movement; after-the-fact interviews and focus groups on mobility; keeping textual, pictorial, or digital time–space diaries; various methods of cyber-research, cyberethnography and computer simulations; imaginative travel using multimedia methods attentive to the affective and atmospheric feeling of place; tracking affective objects that attach memories to places; and finally methods that measure the spatial structuring and temporal pulse of transfer points and places of in-between-ness in which the circulation of people and objects is slowed down or stopped, as well as facilitated and speeded up (Scheller 2011, p. 7).
- 15.
Daily commuters, city users, businessmen, tourists, but also long-distance commuting and multiple residences.
- 16.
The EU research “Job mobilities and Family Lives in Europe” (http://www.jobmob-and-famlives.eu/) identifies among the new forms of daily mobility: Long-Distance Commuters (LDC); Overnighters spending at least 60 overnights away from home during the last 12 months for occupational reasons; Recent Relocators over a distance of at least 50 km; Long-Distance Relationships (LDR).
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Pucci, P., Manfredini, F., Tagliolato, P. (2015). Mobility Practices and Mobile Phone Data. In: Mapping Urban Practices Through Mobile Phone Data. SpringerBriefs in Applied Sciences and Technology(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14833-5_1
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