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Defining a city — delineating urban areas using cell-phone data

Nature Cities volume 1, pages 117–125 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

What is a city? Researchers use different criteria and datasets to define it—from population density to traffic flows. We argue there is one dataset that could serve as a proxy of the temporal and spatial connections that make cities what they are: geolocated data from the world’s more than 7 billion cell-phone users. Cell-phone data are a proxy of people’s presence in a given area and of their movement between areas. Combined with computational methods, these data can support city delineations that are dynamic, responding to multiple statistical and administrative requirements, and tailored to different research needs, thus accelerating ongoing work in urban science.

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Fig. 1: Cell-phone data and process methods.
Fig. 2: An illustration delineating cities using cell-phone data.

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Acknowledgements

L.D. and Y.L. acknowledge the support of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 41830645). M. Batty acknowledges support from the Alan Turing Institute under QUANT2-Contract-CID-381581. G.B.W. acknowledges the generous support of Toby Shannon via the Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) of Canada and of the NSF under grant no. PHY1838420. F.D., P.S. and C.R. acknowledge all members of MIT Senseable City Lab consortium.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Systems, School of Earth and Space Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, China

    Lei Dong & Yu Liu

  2. Senseable City Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Fabio Duarte, Paolo Santi & Carlo Ratti

  3. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Gilles Duranton & Gary Hack

  4. The Institute of Informatics and Telematics CNR, Pisa, Italy

    Paolo Santi

  5. Université Paris-Saclay, CNRS, CEA, Institut de Physique Théorique, Gif-sur-Yvette, France

    Marc Barthelemy & Vincent Verbavatz

  6. Centre d’Analyse et de Mathématique Sociales (CNRS/EHESS), Paris, France

    Marc Barthelemy

  7. University College London, London, UK

    Michael Batty

  8. University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

    Luís Bettencourt

  9. University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    Michael Goodchild

  10. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Gary Hack

  11. Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris, France

    Denise Pumain

  12. Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, China

    Wenzhong Shi

  13. Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM, USA

    Geoffrey B. West

  14. The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China

    Anthony G. O. Yeh

Authors
  1. Lei Dong
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  16. Carlo Ratti
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Contributions

All the authors participated in the discussion and writing of the paper.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Paolo Santi.

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Nature Cities thanks Lewis Dijkstra, Mark Montgomery and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Dong, L., Duarte, F., Duranton, G. et al. Defining a city — delineating urban areas using cell-phone data. Nat Cities 1, 117–125 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44284-023-00019-z

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