A New Map of the Milan Urban Region Through Mobile Phone Data

Interpretative tools for identifying mobility practices in the contemporary cities are needed, not only for the limitations of conventional data sources1, but also because new forms of mobility are emerging, describing new city dynamics and timevariations in the use of urban spaces by temporary populations. These mobility practices result from the combination of physical and virtual mobility, leading to new, mixed forms of daily, residential, and travel mobility (Flamm & Kaufmann 2006). The transformations to practices of mobility question the available sources and open up toward operative challenges: the analysis of the space-time variability of mobility practices, while offering a representation of various urban rhythms2 and identifying different mobile populations, remains difficult to achieve with traditional data sources. In this perspective, an interesting contribution may be provided by mobile phone network data as a tool for real-time monitoring of urban dynamics and mobile practices. In recent years, several research projects focused on the potentiality of mobile phone traffic data as promising sources for the analysis, visualization and interpretation of people’s presence and movements in urban spaces. The contribution that may come from mobile phone network data for the analysis and description of urban practices, seems of great interest, due to its fine spatial and temporal resolution. As tested in several studies (Ratti et al. 2006; Ahas & Mark 2005; Soto & Frías- Martínez 2011a,b; Reades et al. 2007; Gonzalez et al. 2008), passive monitoring of anonymous telephone traffic represents a valuable alternative to traditional methods,