A new study published in Nature by the Centre for Complex Network Research in Boston took advantage of the locational information that is available through our cell phones to track human movement. On a large scale, this is one of the most successful attempts that I know of to understand how groups of people move through a city. Some of the potential benefits of such understanding are clear. The more we know about behaviour in cities, the better we can design them. Calculating the general rules that underly our movement can help us to understand how catastrophic diseases might spread through cities and what could be done to slow the process.
The main outcome of this study suggests that it may be fairly simple to model our movements through cities because we're, well, fairly boring creatures when it comes to movement and space. On average, city dwellers don't go very far in the course of a day and they tend to go back to the same few places over and over again. This is, perhaps, not rocket science. Other than transient events like vacations and business trips, most of us travel in endless simple routes -- home, office, supermarket, cinema, etc. Few of us leap out of our chairs to go off on long spontaneous psychogeographic wanderings to stretch our spatial abilities. More's the pity.
I can't help wondering how such patterns might have changed over time and how they might vary in different types of living arrangements. Modern patterns of living have made everything available everywhere and so discouraged us from moving very far at all. As a result, we've become physically frail, overweight creatures without much of a sense of where we are or what's out there.
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