Commuter networks and community detection: a method for planning sub regional areas

摘要

A major issue for policy makers and planners is the definition of the "ideal"regional partition, i.e. the delimitation of sub-regional domains showing asufficient level of homogeneity with respect to some specific territorialfeatures. In Sardinia, the second major island in the Mediterranean sea,politicians and analysts have been involved in a 50 year process ofidentification of the correct pattern for the province, an intermediateadministrative body in between the Regional and the municipal administration.In this paper, we compare some intermediate body partitions of Sardinia withthe patterns of the communities of workers and students, by applying groupingmethodologies based on the characterization of Sardinian commuters' system as acomplex weighted network. We adopt an algorithm based on the maximization ofthe weighted modularity of this network to detect productive basins composed bymunicipalities showing a certain degree of cohesiveness in terms of commuterflows. The results obtained lead to conclude that new provinces in Sardiniaseem to have been designed -even unconsciously- as labour basins ofmunicipalities with similar commuting behaviour.