Driven by access to large volumes of detailed movement data, the study
of human mobility has grown rapidly over the past decade. This body of
work has argued that human mobility is scale-free, has proposed models
to generate scale-free moving distance distribution and explained how
the scale-free distribution arises from aggregating displacements across
scales. However, the field of human mobility has not explicitly
addressed how mobility is structured by geographical constraints-such as
the outlines of landmasses, lakes, rivers, the placement of buildings,
roadways, and cities.
Using unique datasets capturing millions of movements between precise
locations, this paper shows how separating the effect of geography from
mobility choices reveals a universal power law spanning five orders of
magnitude (from 10 m to 1,000,000 m). We incorporate geography through
the 'pair distribution function,' a fundamental quantity from condensed
matter physics that encapsulates the structure of locations on which
mobility occurs. This distribution captures the constraints that
geography places on human mobility across different length scales.
Our description conclusively addresses debates between distance-based
and opportunity-based perspectives on human mobility. By demonstrating
how the spatial distribution of human settlements shapes human mobility,
we provide a novel perspective that bridges the gap between these
previously opposing ideas.
Негізгі бет Houses are water: decomposing geographical and universal aspects of human mobility, Louis Boucherie
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