Mapping different forms of mobility in the Milan urban region

The increase in urban mobility is one of the key issues of contemporary cities. The need for new types of data and representations useful to describe the new forms of daily urban mobility is widely known. The wider urban scale – named urban region – is the scale at which most of the urban and socio-economical phenomena are visible. Urban growth patterns, settlements and activities distribution, demographics and economics dynamics can be fully understood and interpreted at this macro scale, which is not recognizable on the administrative boundaries. The aim of this paper is to present three approaches to mobility mapping based on different data sources, both traditional and innovative, for the Milan urban region (Northern Italy). Traditional sources for the analysis of daily mobility are Census data or surveys based on interviews to mobile populations. They provide a very partial picture of the mobility practices in urban areas, because they collect only flows for job and study purposes. Innovative sources of data are mobile phone activity data that have been used for building a sequence of mobility maps in a typical working day. The Main Map is therefore composed of two parts: a representation of systematic and non-systematic mobility in the Milan urban region; and a sequence of maps created by using telephone traffic data showing daily mobility patterns. These maps can provide useful information for understanding the recent changes that had occurred in the Milan urban region, but they can also offer a methodological reference for the analysis of mobility in general.