Mobility census for monitoring rapid urban development

Monitoring urban structure and development requires high-quality data at high spatio-temporal resolution. While traditional censuses have provided foundational insights into demographic and socio-economic aspects of urban life, their pace may not always align with the pace of urban development. To complement these traditional methods, we explore the potential of analysing alternative big-data sources, such as human mobility data. However, these often noisy and unstructured big data pose new challenges. Here, we propose a method to extract meaningful explanatory variables and classifications from such data. Using movement data from Beijing, which are produced as a by-product of mobile communication, we show that meaningful features can be extracted, revealing, for example, the emergence and absorption of subcentres. This method allows the analysis of urban dynamics at a high-spatial resolution (here 500 m) and near real-time frequency, and high computational efficiency, which is especially suitable for tracing event-driven mobility changes and their impact on urban structures.