The advent of geolocated ICT technologies opens the possibility of exploring
how people use space in cities, bringing an important new tool for urban
scientists and planners, especially for regions where data is scarce or not
available. Here we apply a functional network approach to determine land use
patterns from mobile phone records. The versatility of the method allows us to
run a systematic comparison between Spanish cities of various sizes. The method
detects four major land use types that correspond to different temporal
patterns. The proportion of these types, their spatial organization and scaling
show a strong similarity between all cities that breaks down at a very local
scale, where land use mixing is specific to each urban area. Finally, we
introduce a model inspired by Schelling's segregation, able to explain and
reproduce these results with simple interaction rules between different land
uses.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures + Supplementary informatio
