The Death of Distance

Despite a certain line of thought mainly developed across the end of the 90’s and the beginning of the 00’s, which claimed for a supposed “Death of Distance”, arguing for a “Flatter World” in respect to social and economic phenomena, hard evidence still seems to stand up for the contrary. The same spread of ICT and new communication technologies that supposedly would have put an “End to Geography”, has indeed provided plenty of data for successive studies that assessed the relevance of geographic dimension in shaping nowadays interactions between and within urban environments.

The thesis work aims to dwell further in the understanding of socio-economic processes mediated through space, and on their effects on the urban milieu, by exploiting, for its own analyses, data coming from the exact same technologies that the “World is Flat” hypothesis theorised as one of the pillars of the Globalization 3.0 homogeneous landscape.

In doing so, it positions itself at the convergence of different research paths: Economics, Urban Studies, Social and Quantitative Research, Computational Informatics..hopefully providing an additional example of the usefulness and richness of applying Computer Science methodologies to innovative data sources harvested from the mobile phone sensors to the service of urban research.

Year: 2013

Client: uncommissioned

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