Browsing by Author "Laaksonen, Iivari"

Multi-local living is a complex social phenomenon that is tightly connected to human mobility. In previous research, the phenomenon has been mainly researched with official statistics that fail to capture the dynamic nature of people’s mobilities and dwelling. This thesis approaches multi-locality in Finland and in the county South Savo from the perspective of second homes with novel data sources like mobile phone data and electricity consumption data. These spatially and temporally accurate big data sources can be used to ensure sufficient coverage of population and geographic area. I approach multi-local living by analyzing the spatiotemporal changes in people’s presence with mobile phone data, and by examining how the changes relate to second homes in different areas separately for workdays and weekends. This is examined both for the whole country and by comparing different counties. In the thesis, mobile phone data is utilized as the ground truth to assess the performance of household occupancy detection methods for electricity consumption, and to examine how electricity consumption data captures the spatiotemporal dynamics of second home users in South Savo. The results indicate that people are generally more mobile during the summer, and the seasonal growth in people’s presence correlates strongly with second homes. This shows a prominent seasonal effect for multi-local living in Finland. Additionally, it is shown that the results vary spatially as there is variation in the results both between counties and within South Savo. The best performing second home occupancy detection method is revealed by correlation analyses between mobile phone data and electricity consumption data. Moreover, it is shown that electricity data correlates better with mobile phone data during the summer, and that the data captures the monthly dynamics of second home users well. This further highlights the seasonal effect of multi-local living. The thesis provides valuable insight into how the seasonal variation of population in different areas is connected to multi-local living in Finland. Furthermore, it is shown that novel data sources can capture the changes in people’s presence at multiple spatial levels with high temporal accuracy, and that they can be utilized to study multi-local living.