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Cited by 361Human Mobility and Location-Based AnalysisUrban Design and Spatial AnalysisComplex Systems and Time Series Analysis

The scales of human mobility

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Alessandretti, Laura, Aslak, Ulf, Lehmann, Sune·2020·Nature
DOI 10.1038/s41586-020-2909-1
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Abstract

There is a contradiction at the heart of our current understanding of individual and collective mobility patterns. On the one hand, a highly influential body of literature on human mobility driven by analyses of massive empirical datasets finds that human movements show no evidence of characteristic spatial scales. There, human mobility is described as scale free 1-3. On the other hand, geographically, the concept of scale-referring to meaningful levels of description from individual buildings to neighbourhoods, cities, regions and countries-is central for the description of various aspects of human behaviour, such as socioeconomic interactions, or political and cultural dynamics 4,5. Here we resolve this apparent paradox by showing that day-to-day human mobility does indeed contain meaningful scales, corresponding to spatial 'containers' that restrict mobility behaviour. The scale-free results arise from aggregating displacements across containers. We present a simple model-which given a person's trajectory-infers their neighbourhood, city and so on, as well as the sizes of these geographical containers. We find that the containers-characterizing the trajectories of more than 700,000 individuals-do indeed have typical sizes. We show that our model is also able to generate highly realistic trajectories and provides a way to understand the differences in mobility behaviour across countries, gender groups and urban-rural areas.

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  • Human mobility is known to follow certain universal principles, such as scaling laws of mobility.

    “Still, human mobility is known to follow certain universal principles, such as scaling laws of mobility (Alessandretti et al. 2020;Pappalardo et al. 2016;Song et al. 2010b), which suggests that our findings may reflect more general behavioral regularities.”

    From Visitation patterns across mobility groups: wandering, commuting, and exploring (2026) · cites this paper as Alessandretti et al. 2020

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Research works printed but not linked: 2

  1. [12][12] Larsen, J. & Urry, J. Mobilities, networks, geographies (Routledge, 2016). -
  2. [54][54] Train, K. E. Discrete choice methods with simulation (Cambridge university press, 2009). -

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Authors
Alessandretti, L., Aslak, U., & Lehmann, S.
Affiliations
University of Copenhagen (DK)
Corresponding author
Lehmann, Sune
ORCID
Venue
Nature
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Published
2020-11-18
Volume
587
Issue
7834
Pages
402-407
ISSN
  • 0028-0836 (ISSN-L)
  • 1476-4687
DOI
10.1038/s41586-020-2909-1
OpenAlex
W3098208509
Cited by
361
References
90
Citations by year
2026: 74 · 2025: 71 · 2024: 76 · 2023: 48 · 2022: 55 · 2021: 34 · 2020: 3
FWCI
31.45
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
Locations
  • Nature (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • Research at the University of Copenhagen (University of Copenhagen) (submittedVersion)
  • RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
  • Technical University of Denmark, DTU Orbit (Technical University of Denmark, DTU) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Transportation › Human Mobility and Location-Based Analysis
  • Physical Sciences › Engineering › Building and Construction › Urban Design and Spatial Analysis
  • Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Complex Systems and Time Series Analysis
Keywords
human mobility, spatial scale, neighborhood size, city size, single-cell trajectory analysis, power-law distribution, mobility behavior, urban-rural differences, gender differences
MeSH terms
Built Environment, Denmark, Humans, Models, Theoretical, Reproducibility of Results, Human Migration

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