Depicting urban boundaries from a mobility network of spatial interactions: A case study of Great Britain with geo-located Twitter data

Existing urban boundaries are usually defined by government agencies for administrative, economic, and political purposes. Defining urban boundaries that consider socio-economic relationships and citizen commute patterns is important for many aspects of urban and regional planning. In this paper, we describe a method to delineate urban boundaries based upon human interactions with physical space inferred from social media. Specifically, we depicted the urban boundaries of Great Britain using a mobility network of Twitter user spatial interactions, which was inferred from over 69 million geo-located tweets. We define the non-administrative anthropographic boundaries in a hierarchical fashion based on different physical movement ranges of users derived from the collective mobility patterns of Twitter users in Great Britain. The results of strongly connected urban regions in the form of communities in the network space yield geographically cohesive, non-overlapping urban areas, which provide a clear delineation of the non-administrative anthropographic urban boundaries of Great Britain. The method was applied to both national (Great Britain) and municipal scales (the London metropolis). While our results corresponded well with the administrative boundaries, many unexpected and interesting boundaries were identified. Importantly, as the depicted urban boundaries exhibited a strong instance of spatial proximity, we employed a gravity model to understand the distance decay effects in shaping the delineated urban boundaries. The model explains how geographical distances found in the mobility patterns affect the interaction intensity among different non-administrative anthropographic urban areas, which provides new insights into human spatial interactions with urban space.Comment: 32 pages, 7 figures, International Journal of Geographic Information Scienc

The anatomy of urban social networks and its implications in the searchability problem

The appearance of large geolocated communication datasets has recently increased our understanding of how social networks relate to their physical space. However, many recurrently reported properties, such as the spatial clustering of network communities, have not yet been systematically tested at different scales. In this work we analyze the social network structure of over 25 million phone users from three countries at three different scales: country, provinces and cities. We consistently find that this last urban scenario presents significant differences to common knowledge about social networks. First, the emergence of a giant component in the network seems to be controlled by whether or not the network spans over the entire urban border, almost independently of the population or geographic extension of the city. Second, urban communities are much less geographically clustered than expected. These two findings shed new light on the widely-studied searchability in self-organized networks. By exhaustive simulation of decentralized search strategies we conclude that urban networks are searchable not through geographical proximity as their country-wide counterparts, but through an homophily-driven community structure

Mobility in Europe: Analysis of the 2005 Eurobarometer Survey on Geographical and Labour Market Mobility

The European Commission has designated the year 2006 as 'European Year of Workers' Mobility'. The purpose of the initiative is to inform EU citizens of the benefits and the costs of both geographical mobility and job or labour market mobility; the realities of working in another country or changing job or career; and the rights they are entitled to as migrant workers. The initiative also aims to promote the exchange of good practice between public authorities and institutions, the social partners and the private sector, and to promote greater study of the scale and nature of geographical and job mobility within the Union

Case study report The view of the EU cultural and science diplomacy from Tunisia. EL-CSID Working Paper Issue 2018/13 • April 2018

Tunisia is part of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), revised in 2015, alongside 15 other countries from Southern and Eastern neighbouring regions, and beneficiary from the European Neighbourhood and Partnership Instrument (ENPI). Although the Euro-Mediterranean relationship under previous guises was slightly impeded or besmirched at some point by its dependency to the old Tunisian regime1, now, due to its role at the forefront of the democratic movement in the region, post-2011 Tunisia enjoys a relatively privileged status amongst the MENA countries in general, and in the Maghreb in particular2. A “privileged partnership” was established in 20123. This place was confirmed in 2016 by the Joint communication to the European Parliament and the Council: “Strengthening EU support for Tunisia”4. European days have been organised in 2016. In November of this same year, the HR/VP Federica Mogherini payed a visit to Tunis, and the EU Commissioner for ENP, Johannes Hahn, attended the conference “Tunisia 2020”. In December 2016, the Tunisian president Beji Caid Essebsi went to Brussels to sign the “EUTunisia Youth Partnership”. Tunisia is one of the top beneficiaries of EU regional programmes for the Southern neighbourhood, in areas such as environment, energy, migration and security. The support to Tunisia amounted to 250 million € in 2016, and to 300 million € in 2017. The EU’s support to Tunisia encompasses many domains: economic reforms, private sector, employability, vocational training, schools, higher education, health, agriculture and rural development, decentralisation and regional development, environment and energy, transportation, governance, justice, security, human rights and civil society, gender equality, media and culture, migration and mobility, cross-border cooperation

An analytical framework to nowcast well-being using mobile phone data

An intriguing open question is whether measurements made on Big Data recording human activities can yield us high-fidelity proxies of socio-economic development and well-being. Can we monitor and predict the socio-economic development of a territory just by observing the behavior of its inhabitants through the lens of Big Data? In this paper, we design a data-driven analytical framework that uses mobility measures and social measures extracted from mobile phone data to estimate indicators for socio-economic development and well-being. We discover that the diversity of mobility, defined in terms of entropy of the individual users' trajectories, exhibits (i) significant correlation with two different socio-economic indicators and (ii) the highest importance in predictive models built to predict the socio-economic indicators. Our analytical framework opens an interesting perspective to study human behavior through the lens of Big Data by means of new statistical indicators that quantify and possibly "nowcast" the well-being and the socio-economic development of a territory

Matryoshka journeys: im/mobility during migration

Acts of mobility require corresponding acts of immobility (or suspended mobility). Migrant journeys are not only about movement. Indeed, in the present policy context, this is ever more true. Whether a migrant is contained within a hidden compartment, detained by migration authorities, waiting for remittances to continue, or marooned within a drifting boat at sea, these moments of immobility have become an inherent part of migrant journeys especially as states have increased controls at and beyond their borders. Migrants themselves view this fragmentation – the stopping, waiting and containment – as part of the journey to be endured. Drawing on the authors’ fieldwork in Central America and Southern Europe, this paper destabilises the boundary between transit and settlement, speaking to a larger policy discourse that justifies detentions and deportations from the United States and countries on the periphery of Europe. We argue that migrants’ nested experiences of these ‘matryoshka journeys’ reveal how increased migration controls encourage them not only to take greater risks during the journey, but also to forfeit their agency at opportune moments. In turn, states exploit images of such im/mobility during the journey in order to emphasise the irrational risks migrants take in order to traverse seas and deserts and to cloak their own border policies in a humanitarian discourse of rescue