title: From mobile phone data to the spatial structure of cities.
abstract: Pervasive infrastructures, such as cell phone networks, enable to capture large amounts of human behavioral data but also provide information about the structure of cities and their dynamical properties. In this article, we focus on these last aspects by studying phone data recorded during 55 days in 31 Spanish cities. We first define an urban dilatation index which measures how the average distance between individuals evolves during the day, allowing us to highlight different types of city structure. We then focus on hotspots, the most crowded places in the city. We propose a parameter free method to detect them and to test the robustness of our results. The number of these hotspots scales sublinearly with the population size, a result in agreement with previous theoretical arguments and measures on employment datasets. We study the lifetime of these hotspots and show in particular that the hierarchy of permanent ones, which constitute the 'heart' of the city, is very stable whatever the size of the city. The spatial structure of these hotspots is also of interest and allows us to distinguish different categories of cities, from monocentric and "segregated" where the spatial distribution is very dependent on land use, to polycentric where the spatial mixing between land uses is much more important. These results point towards the possibility of a new, quantitative classification of cities using high resolution spatio-temporal data.
authors.affiliation: 1] Institut de Physique Théorique, CEA-CNRS (URA 2306), F-91191, Gif-sur-Yvette, France [2] Géographie-Cités, CNRS-Paris 1-Paris 7 (UMR 8504), 13 rue du four, FR-75006 Paris, France.
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Louail
authors.affiliation: IFISC, Instituto de Física Interdisciplinar y Sistemas Complejos (CSIC-UIB), Campus Universitat de les Illes Balears, E-07122 Palma de Mallorca, Spain.
authors.forename: Maxime
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Lenormand
authors.affiliation: Nommon Solutions and Technologies, calle Cañas 8, E-28043 Madrid, Spain.
authors.forename: Oliva G
authors.initials: OG
authors.lastname: Cantu Ros
authors.affiliation: Nommon Solutions and Technologies, calle Cañas 8, E-28043 Madrid, Spain.
authors.forename: Miguel
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Picornell
authors.affiliation: Nommon Solutions and Technologies, calle Cañas 8, E-28043 Madrid, Spain.
authors.forename: Ricardo
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Herranz
authors.affiliation: Telefonica Research, E-28050 Madrid, Spain.
authors.forename: Enrique
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Frias-Martinez
authors.affiliation: IFISC, Instituto de Física Interdisciplinar y Sistemas Complejos (CSIC-UIB), Campus Universitat de les Illes Balears, E-07122 Palma de Mallorca, Spain.
authors.forename: José J
authors.initials: JJ
authors.lastname: Ramasco
authors.affiliation: 1] Institut de Physique Théorique, CEA-CNRS (URA 2306), F-91191, Gif-sur-Yvette, France [2] Centre d'Analyse et de Mathématique Sociales, EHESS-CNRS (UMR 8557), 190-198 avenue de France, FR-75013 Paris, France.
authors.forename: Marc
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Barthelemy