Sociomeeting: Irreversibility of Urban Mobility
Daily commuting is one of the most systematic ways in which cities reorganize themselves. Each morning, residential populations are redistributed across workplaces. In this talk, we will present a stochastic framework for describing urban commuting using origin–destination data. By interpreting home-to-work movement as a Markov process, we introduce a measure of irreversibility inspired by stochastic thermodynamics. This approach allows us to quantify how individual trips, urban areas, and entire cities contribute to the irreversible structure of daily mobility. Applied to U.S. cities, the method shows that entropy production is lower in denser cities, and increases with the prevalence of unidirectional commuting flows, the spectral gap of the commuting network, and the heterogeneity of workplace population distributions. These associations persist over time and combine information from different, not necessarily correlated, dimensions of urban structure. The result is a quantitative perspective on how the spatial organization of cities is encoded in their daily commuting dynamics.
This Talk will be broadcasted in the following zoom link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/89027654460?pwd=Wg9TYMPqqP2ipfj2JVvEagmzaTw29c.1
Contact details:
Juan Fernández Gracia Contact form