Scientific Presentations
LabTalks@DCD
Department of Digital and Computational Demography
Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR), Rostock, Germany, February 12, 2025
11:00 AM: Talk with Olle Järv - Mobility as a tool to understand dynamic society: reimagine segregation, border regions and (transnational) multilocality from digital traces
Abstract
Our society is about constant mobilities and interactions of people that constitutes in (re)shaping the complex network society as well as the dynamic functioning of cities, regions and countries in space and time. To understand and cope with societal phenomena and processes emerging from such dynamic functioning of a society, we need to see beyond static residential population and permanent migration. For this, the combination of using digital (big) data sources as proxies for spatial and social footprints of people and considering human mobility as a tool to understand society is a promising approach to obtain new insights about the functioning of our society. Based on mobile phone, social media and electricity consumption data, I present three empirical cases relevant for governance and planning at local, regional and international level.
In the first example, to move beyond traditional residential segregation, I demonstrate how mobilities of people create socio-spatial segregation in places over time and how various population groups are exposed to dynamic segregation. In the second example, to move beyond national “containers” and administrative top-down definition of border regions, I reveal the interactions of people across country borders and show how interactions form de facto functional border regions. In the third example, to move beyond the official definition of one place of residence per person, I capture the lifestyles of people with multiple (transnational) residences from mobilities of people, and address why multilocality and population with multiple residences matter.
About
Olle comes from the University Helsinki where he works as an Academy of Finland Research Fellow at the Digital Geography Lab research team. As a human geographer, his interdisciplinary research interests focus on human mobilities in spatial, temporal and social contexts. He is particularly interested in how various big data sources such as mobile phone and social media data can be used to examine individual spatial mobilities and dynamic population to understand various social processes and phenomena. His research covers topics from tourism and multilocality, segregation and socio-spatial inequalities to urban accessibility and regional attractiveness. In recent years, Olle has examined ways to use big data for studying cross-border mobilities, transnational lifestyles, and functional border regions in Europe in his project "Tracing Interactions and Mobilities Beyond State Borders: Towards New Transnational Spaces (BORDERSPACE)".
Online Seminar Talk, February, 12th from 11:00 a.m. to 12 p.m. (Rostock time)