Using mobile phone geolocalisation for ‘socio‐geographical’ analysis of co‐ordination, urban mobilities, and social integration patterns

We report here on research aiming to reconstruct urban mobilities and communication practices through mobile phone base data. We have developed a software probe that can be implemented on a user's mobile phone, and which allows the joint recording and collection of the successive locations experienced by the user (through the identification of the cell in which the mobile phone is located) and all types of communicative acts performed through the mobile phone. This has been combined to indepth interviews with subjects over one week of their mobility and mobile communication behaviour. The method has been tested over a sample of 24 adults living in Paris, all in the 30–45 age range, half male and half female, with varying histories of mobility and professional flexibility constraints, in order to reconstruct their mobility and their communication‐based activity spaces. We show how such a method enables the construction of a long time perspective on mobilities, and particularly on the articulation of displacements and mobile communication, which is an important issue in the ‘new mobilities paradigm’. We show how, over longer periods, mobility and communication practices combine into patterns marking social integration (or disintegration). We also show how our method allows us to construct new types of indicators, such as the propensity to communicate from a given type of place per unit of time, that reveal underlying patterns such as a higher propensity to call in mobile situations and transitory locations. This type of approach may be particularly relevant to the ongoing convergence of transport and communication studies, and to bridge the gap between communication research and mobility studies.