"How human mobility data can become a mainstream part of the analytical toolkit for urban and DRM specialists..."

Recent changes in smartphone technology have transformed the availability and practical relevance of human mobility data. While mobile phone data has been used for more than a decade to inform post-disaster recovery, smartphones now routinely capture human mobility patterns at GPS accuracy. Such data - which is accessible to Task Teams under the Development Data Partnership - opens up new use cases for urban planning and resilience, from modeling commuting flows and understanding the impacts of COVID-19 on local businesses to evaluating the impact of urban regeneration investments on local foot traffic.

Through funding from the DT4D Challenge, this pilot work explored how human mobility data can become a mainstream part of the analytical toolkit for urban and DRM specialists. We will discuss three use cases: 

• assessing connectivity challenges of lagging urban districts in San Jose, Costa Rica;
• impact of extreme weather on transport accessibility in Chennai, India; and
• visit patterns to jobs and heritage sites in Kathmandu, Nepal. 

Enhancing Disaster Preparedness Through Smartphone Location Data is one of the pilots awarded through the first cohort of the DT4D Challenge, which matches innovative pilots with financing to test the scalability of proposed solutions. The Webinar is a discussion on scalable tools and use cases developed under this innovation effort, and a debate on the future directions for enriching urban diagnostics using big data.