MULTI
SCALE
MOBIL
ITIES

From daily movement
to spatial inequality

Cities are not static arrangements of neighbourhoods — they are systems of movement. Who goes where, how often, and who they meet along the way shapes a person's lived experience of inequality far more than where they happen to sleep.

Yet urban research has been slow to move beyond residential measures of segregation toward a dynamic, mobility-based account of how inequality is reproduced — and experienced — across daily life. This colloquium asks how daily mobility shapes spatial inequality in European cities, and what that means for social integration, urban competitiveness and environmental justice. Free and open to the public, register here.

One question,
every scale

Six researchers trace how people actually move through cities — across the full range of daily activities, across socioeconomic groups, and across the migrant trajectories, environmental exposures and computational models that connect them. Together the talks build a multiscale picture of how urban structure, daily movement and social inequality intertwine across European cities — the synthesis that much research, including in and on the Swiss context, often lacks.

• Experienced segregation
• Activity spaces
• Migration & integration
• Heat & exposure
• GeoAI & modelling

Symposium

11 September 2026 · EPFL, Lausanne · room GC B1 10

The morning talks are open to the public. The afternoon includes a lunch and discussion for invited participants.

1. 10:00 An opening by Andrew Renninger
   on spatial inequalities across scales
2. 10:20 Mattia Mazzoli
   Mobility, segregation and preference
3. 10:40 Marc Duran-Sala
   Human mobility and urban climate
4. 11:00 Coffee break
5. 11:30 Olena Holubowska
   Mobility over the life course
6. 11:50 Anirudh Govind
   The scales of segregation through cocooning
7. 12:10 Ye Hong
   Artificial intelligence for spatial inequality
8. 13:00 Lunch
9. 14:00 A roundtable discussion chaired by Gabriele Manoli
   on unifying research across scales

Organised by

• Olena Holubowska University of Neuchâtel
• Andrew Renninger Central European University
• Marc Duran-Sala EPFL
• Gabriele Manoli EPFL