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2010
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Regions and borders of mobile telephony in Belgium and in the Brussels metropolitan zone

Press release

Notes de la rédaction

This is the press release related to the article from Vincent Blondel, Gautier Krings and Isabelle Thomas, published October the 4th , 2010. Read the article.

Brussels is a city of a thousand faces, woven into a very dense fabric of relationships: political relations as a ‘multicapital’, physical relations as a communications node and point of convergence for tens of thousands of commuters and visitors, and economic relations as the main economic centre of Belgium. As a metropolis, it is also a place where social relationships of all types are formed – relationships which are very difficult to represent.

This is however what Vincent Blondel (UCL & MIT), Gautier Krings (UCL) and Isabelle Thomas (UCL) were drawn to, and in order to achieve their goal, they focused on the mobile telephone communications of the customers of a major Belgian provider. They attempted to determine which municipalities in the country communicated with each other. By means of the identification of the municipalities of residence of the people being called and the callers, regardless of where the phone calls were made, they mapped the telephone communications on a Belgian scale.

Only the telephone communications between the customers of this provider who made at least six calls in six months were used. An algorithm was made allowing the Belgian municipalities to be paired and grouped according to the frequency of calls as well as their average length.

The authors of the study thus open a window onto the social relations which find concrete expression in mobile telephone calls. The resulting maps stand out due to the borders of the different ‘telephone areas’ (of which there are 17 based on the frequency of calls, and two based on the average length of calls).

It also appears that, with a few exceptions, the linguistic border is highly impermeable. A notable exception is that of the city of Brussels which, as regards the frequency of calls, appears to be firmly rooted in a telephone area including its outskirts in Flemish Brabant and almost all of Walloon Brabant. As regards the average length, Brussels, as well as eight municipalities with facilities (including five of the six which surround Brussels) are integrated into the French-speaking area.

More than 200 million communications were analysed, providing a vision of a country divided in two and of a vast Brussels metropolitan area which extends well beyond the 19 municipalities, encompassing the west and the south of former Brabant – an additional piece of information which the authors propose to add to the discussion on the relations between the capital city and its socioeconomic environment.

References
Blondel, Vincent, Krings, Gautier, Thomas, Isabelle,“ Regions and borders of mobile telephony in Belgium and in the Brussels metropolitan zone”, Brussels Studies [Online], General collection, No 42, October the 4th 2010. URL: https://journals.openedition.org/brussels/806
Contact
Benjamin Wayens, Senior Editor: bwayens[at]brusselsstudies.be

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