Dynamics and evolution of urban patterns: the evidence of the Mobile Landscape project

This research is focussed on city and territory and it develops innovative approaches for urban studies. In particular, this project studies the relationships between dynamic components, the cities users, and the physical environment, such as the buildings, the containers of functions and the infrastructures. In fact this study aims to understand where, when, how intensively and how long a territorial system is used. This research develops an evolutionary approach to urban studies and concerns the development of a new method of urban monitoring, called Mobile Landscapes. The new vision of the city, conceived as a complex system, is an efficient strategy for facing the problems of the contemporary city, such as continuous growth, mobility and atmospheric pollution. The presented technique elaborates location based data from cell phones through GIS tools, to study the distribution of the urban activity in space and in time and to appraise the density of the cities users and their movements through the territory. The case study described in this paper uses data from cell phones antennas in the metropolitan area of Pescara-Chieti, Italy, and is relative to a previous work in the city centre of Milan. In this case, a wider area, which includes both the urban and rural areas, is examined. Commuting data from peripheral coastal areas to the city of Pescara were detected and measured in working days. Results show that the concentration of activity is higher in a limited area of the coast and, especially in summer, a higher activity is recorded along the entire coast due to the presence of tourists.