Laura Alessandretti

Title: The geography that emerges from movement: regularities in large-scale mobility data

Abstract: Over the past two decades, passively collected mobility data has made it possible to observe how people use space in everyday life, at high spatial and temporal resolution and for large populations. This raises a question: which structures emerge from the way people use space, and how far do they generalise? Drawing on work from my group, I will describe four such structures. First, places themselves, which can be defined in a purely data-driven way, from where people stop rather than where they pass. The way individuals visit them turns out to be strikingly similar across humans and other primate species. Second, places are organised into hierarchies within individuals and across cities. Third, they form networks of sequential visits whose organisation differs systematically between women and men. Fourth, at the scale of the city, mobility is organised along the street networks in ways that follow regularities shared by cities of very different form and history. Taken together, these results suggest that the way we use space is far more shared than the diversity of individual lives and urban forms would lead us to expect. Throughout the talk, I will introduce models that aim to explain where such regularity comes from and discuss what current models do and do not account for.

Bio: Laura Alessandretti is Associate Professor in Modelling Human Dynamics at the Section for Cognitive Systems, DTU Compute, Technical University of Denmark. Her research sits at the intersection of computational social science, network science, and complex systems, using large-scale behavioural data to reveal the principles that govern human mobility and behaviour. Her work has contributed to foundational advances in the study of mobility patterns, while also addressing pressing societal challenges related to inequalities, epidemics, and digital life.