Daily Mobility in Metropolitan Areas

This study seeks to understand the interrelationship between daily mobility and the spatial structure of an emerging metropolitan urban system. It is concerned with the daily mobility of a specific group of inhabitants, higher education students, living in a contemporary metropolis and experiencing urban living. The study’s main aim is to better understand aspects of this complex urban spatial structure through the students’ lives and through their daily mobility to explore specific urban spatial dynamics and trends. This study therefore considers the effects of an accelerated urbanisation process and the development of an increasingly fragmented and segregated socioeconomic environment. In doing so, it highlights the ways in which rapid urban expansion in developing countries has tended to reproduce or maintain a range of inequalities In this study, how the student population lives, works, studies, and spends its leisure time within the Valparaiso Metropolitan Area (VMA) proves to be dependent on a complex of structural factors. Such day-to-day activities are further shaped by more dynamic and perhaps more subtle influences such as the changing functions of the urban space, increasing socioeconomic fragmentation and segmentation and the inequitable provision of public transport across what is a topographically complex area. This research within this study however demonstrates that a better understanding of an individuals’ daily mobility can make visible urban trends that have previously been left undisturbed by the existing traditional origin and destination surveys. The research therefore serves to highlight the social and economic flows that continue to shape the metropolitan spatial structure.