The DOI matches its Crossref record; 89 of the 90 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
The scales of human mobility
Open accessAbstract
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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“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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Cites
Power-Law Distributions in Empirical Data
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Understanding individual human mobility patterns
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- Alessandretti, L., Sapiezynski, P., Sekara, V., Lehmann, S. & Baronchelli, A. Evidence for a conserved quantity in human mobility. Nat. Hum. Behav. 2, 485–491 (2018). · DOI
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Cited by
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The universal visitation law of human mobility
Schläpfer, M., Dong, L., O’Keeffe, K. P., Santi, P., Szell, M., Salat, H., Anklesaria, S., Vazifeh, M. M., Ratti, C., & West, G. B. (2021) · Nature · doi:10.1038/s41586-021-03480-9 · Cited by 449
Goel, R., Goodman, A., Aldred, R., Nakamura, R., Tatah, L., García, L., Zapata-Diomedi, B., de Sá, T. H., Tiwari, G., de Nazelle, A. J., et al. (2021) · Transport Reviews · doi:10.1080/01441647.2021.1915898 · Cited by 253
Gender differences in active travel in major cities across the world
Goel, R., Oyebode, O. O., Foley, L. S., Tatah, L., Millett, C. J., & Woodcock, J. (2022) · Transportation · doi:10.1007/s11116-021-10259-4 · Cited by 170
Future directions in human mobility science
Pappalardo, L., Manley, E., Sekara, V., & Alessandretti, L. (2023) · Nature Computational Science · doi:10.1038/s43588-023-00469-4 · Cited by 134
Self-citationData, measurement and empirical methods in the science of science
Liu, L., Jones, B. F., Uzzi, B., & Wang, D. (2023) · Nature Human Behaviour · doi:10.1038/s41562-023-01562-4 · Cited by 143
Metadata
- Authors
- Alessandretti, L., Aslak, U., & Lehmann, S.
- Affiliations
- University of Copenhagen (DK)
- Corresponding author
- Lehmann, Sune
- Venue
- Nature
- Published
- 2020-11-18
- Volume
- 587
- Issue
- 7834
- Pages
- 402-407
- ISSN
- 0028-0836 (ISSN-L)
- 1476-4687
- 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
- green
- arxiv.org
- 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
- Social Sciences › Urban Studies › 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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