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Hierarchies defined through human mobility

An analysis of worldwide data finds that human mobility has a hierarchical structure. A proposed model that accounts for such hierarchies reproduces differences in mobility behaviour across genders and levels of urbanization.
  1. Elsa Arcaute

    1. Elsa Arcaute is at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London, London W1T 4TJ, UK.

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Our intuition suggests that humans travel across characteristic spatial scales, such as neighbourhoods, cities and countries. However, analyses of large data sets indicate that human mobility has no intrinsic scales1–3. Writing in Nature, Alessandretti et al.4 combine worldwide data with modelling to solve this conundrum.

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Nature 587, 372-373 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-03197-1

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