ANNUAL CONGRESS 2025

Identifying intermediate territories through mobility patterns

Not scheduled

20m

Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul

Oral Track 03 | MOBILITY

Speaker

Federico De Angelis (POLITECNICO DI MILANO)

Description

Sustainability strategies in the mobility sector are often concentrated on large metropolitan hubs or on main transport corridors. On the one hand, in fact, cities have been a field of experimentation for a mobility model alternative to the car-centric one. On the other, resources and institutional efforts have been concentrated to create and strengthen direct connections between them, especially high-speed ones.
Italy is a clear example of that, and the result is that the non-core territories have been underrepresented in the policy agenda, in a country where large cities account for 32% of population. At the margins of the agenda have remained both the remote areas of the country, which do not intrinsically express sufficient mobility demand to be considered by policies of national scope, but also all those areas that make up the “In-between Italy” (from now on Italia di Mezzo), that sum up to 62% of Italian population. Usually, these areas are only considered as an extension of metropolitan commuting basins and with little functional autonomy. To the contrary, innovative and targeted policies would be necessary for these areas, since merely adapting on a smaller scale the strategies implemented in metropolitan territories has proven to be ineffective. The first fundamental step, however, is to identify these territories.
The aim of this paper is to present a methodology that can recognize, isolate and describe the possible Italia di Mezzo exclusively with data related to mobility demand. To build this methodology we relied on consistent and large-scale data, the ISTAT “origin-destination matrix of travel for work or study reasons” of 2011, that however deliberately but necessarily excludes other kinds of mobility, i.e. those linked to leisure, free time and the use of services in general.
First, the matrix data is processed to obtain some significant novel indicators that can allow a first convincing and consistent exploration of the different “Italies”. These indicators are presented and spatialized for all the municipalities, explaining all their qualities but also limits. They are grouped in three categories: flow indexes, dependency indexes and geographical indexes. Since these indexes alone are not able to present such a clear and uniform picture of the Italia di Mezzo from the point of view of commuting mobility, in the second part, through an incremental process, we proceed by composing these indexes and creating a tentative classification. In doing that, we define this Italia di Mezzo by exclusion, eliminating the metropolitan areas (basically metropolitan mobility poles and their commuting basins) and the more remote areas.
In the conclusions we discuss the main outcomes of the indexes and the classification operation, and we also build some possible interpretative considerations about what kind of Italian territories make up the Italia di Mezzo of commuting mobility. More specifically, their consistency in quantitative terms and their degree of homogeneity or possible sub-categorization, also considering the relation between their mobility demand and infrastructures supply.

The research is funded by the European Union - Next Generation EU, in the framework of the GRINS - Growing Resilient, Inclusive and Sustainable Project (GRINS PE00000018 – CUP D43C22003110001). The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union, and the European Union cannot be held responsible for them.