Catch Me if You Can: Workplace Mobility and Big Data

ABSTRACT

A growing number of workers, particularly in the knowledge and service sectors, can perform their work at multiple locations, and it is decreasingly realistic to assume, as researchers and planners have traditionally done, that employment in cities occurs in fixed locations. This suggests that census data or establishment registries do not fully capture where economic activity takes place. Given the role that ICTs play in enabling daytime workplace mobility, and given that they generate substantial amounts of real-time, geolocated data, we ask whether these Big Data can shed light upon the trajectories of mobile workers at the urban scale.

KEYWORDS:

• Workplace mobility
• mobile work
• Big Data
• urban studies
• research data and methods

Notes on Contributors

Filipa Pajević is a PhD student at the School of Urban Planning, McGill University, Montreal, Canada. Her research interests cover the spatial dynamics of mobile and multi-locational workers, knowledge and “gig” work, and new working environments.

Richard G. Shearmur is professor of urban and regional economics at the School of Urban Planning, McGill University, Montreal, Canada. He has published extensively on the location of jobs in metropolitan areas and on the connection between innovation processes and space.