University of Helsinki
Olle Järv (University of Helsinki) and Ate Poorthuis (KU Leuven) organize a special session focusing on how dynamic mobility flows form functioning systems like communities, urban networks and regions at the European Colloquium on Theoretical and Quantitative Geography 2023. The ECTQG’23 takes place 14.–17. September 2023 in Braga, Portugal.
Join us and submit your abstract HERE. Abstract deadline: 15th May 2023. We plan to organize a special issue in a peer-reviewed geographical journal in 2023 and look forward to your contribution on the scope, in addition to our ongoing research in BORDERSPACE project. See our session description, below:
Special Session “From dynamic mobility flows to functional systems: Communities, urban networks, and regions”
The analysis of functional systems through spatial interactions has been a long-standing interest in quantitative geography. While traditional approaches often focused on single cities or countries, limited themselves to specific kinds of mobility (e.g. commuting or migration), or a single point-in-time, new (big) data sources and computational methods have opened up new avenues. By not only providing new insights on temporal rhythms of functional systems, these systems can also be investigated at larger global and cross-country scales, and capture for more heterogeneous types of mobility (e.g. cross-border commuting, multilocal living, recreation and social networks). This can shed new light on, for example, border regions from different countries forming one functional system regarding peoples’ daily practices or the temporal rhythms of urban networks.
This special session focuses on this new frontier regarding empirical evidence and methodological advancements as well as conceptual and theoretical considerations. We invite contributions that apply new computational affordances to furthering our understanding of these underlying functional systems derived from spatial interactions of people. This includes, but is not limited to:
- The conceptualization of functional systems from the perspective of mobilities and social interactions of people;
- The feasibility (opportunities, challenges) of novel data sources and methodology in capturing functional systems from the perspective of mobilities and social interactions of people;
- The transformation of mobile app, social media and other data sources into a reliable proxy for mobility flows;
- The analysis of cross-border mobility and the role of borders in functional systems;
- The algorithmic inference of regions from mobility data and their change over time;
- The intersection between functional systems and the urban-rural continuum;
- The inference of different types of mobility (i.e. those not conventionally captured in register data) from novel mobility data sources.
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The BORDERSPACE project is carried out at the Digital Geography Lab — an interdisciplinary research team focusing on spatial Big Data analytics for fair and sustainable societies at the Department of Geosciences and Geography, University of Helsinki.