An innovative survey of urban systems dynamics: the evidence of the MoTo project

Is our ability to study urban systems and their sustainability exhaustive enough? Are our tools capable of understanding the complexity of contemporary cities? Nowadays, it is necessary to develop new techniques for investigating dynamic processes, within urban systems, that are not directly observable. We ask "how", but, most of all, "when", "how long" and "how intensely" city users move and live within urban space. In recent years, new monitoring techniques have been developed in order to collect information on urban dynamics and provide tools for managing services and infrastructures in urban systems that seem to escape control. The challenge is to improve our understanding of regions and translate this knowledge into good practices of planning and development. In particular, the research presented in this paper is based on a new method for monitoring urban dynamics, which elaborates data from cell phones through GIS tools, to provide a sort of "dynamic census" of population. This was expected to measure, even if approximately, the intensity of use of urban spaces by citizens. Results from the "MoTo" project (Mobile Toscana) - a study of the metropolitan area of central Tuscany, including Florence (Italy) - were presented. Outcomes demonstrated a high relevance of cell phone activity data and a promising efficiency of the technique presented in elaborating information through GIS tools for monitoring human activities in a wide metropolitan area.