Luca Alfieri (p), Ilaria Mariotti, Federica Rossi

Nuno Marques da Costa

The paper explores the probability of knowledge workers (KW), living in Lombardy, to relocate in the medium-term (5 years), considering the impact of flexible working arrangements (FWA) and "twin transitions". Data come from a MOBI-TWIN Horizon project survey involving 566 Italian workers and from the REMAKING Horizon project.
The survey focused on how much importance KW (including remote workers) place on aspects of the twin transition. These aspects include good internet access, public e-services, online shopping options, support for FWA, clean air, renewable energy use, green spaces, etc.
The results of the ordered logit model show that the main determinants for residential relocation are: (i) being a young and cisgender man; (ii) having less than 2 children; (iii) experiencing low life satisfaction in the current location, (iv) and high commuting time. The willingness to change residence is connected to FWA, and the remote working support offered by the destination area, while the green transition does not show any significance. Furthermore, a cluster analysis was conducted to identify distinct typologies of 370 respondents based on their relocation preferences, revealing specific profiles of workers who are more inclined to move to particular types of locations, such as capital metropolitan regions, large cities, small towns, and rural villages.

Nuno Marques da Costa (p), Pedro Franco, Ana Louro, Eduarda Marques da Costa, Paulo Morgado

Tuomas Väisänen

Teleworking and Digitalization: A Spatial Analysis Framework in Portugal in pos-
covid times
The rise of remote work, particularly teleworking, is a defining feature of the digital
transition, reshaping mobility patterns and territorial dynamics. While this phenomenon
accelerated during the pandemic, it remains a persistent trend, influencing economic
structures, urban-rural interactions, and regional consumption patterns. However, a
major challenge in assessing its real impact is the scarcity of consistent and long-term
data, particularly at the local scale.
In Portugal, the lack of granular statistical systems limits the ability to track teleworking
dynamics over time and across municipalities. To address this gap, we propose a
methodological approach that: (1) leverages existing commuting data from censuses and
surveys to quantify teleworking trends and their evolution, and (2) identifies territorial
patterns of telework adoption, analyzing key economic, social, demographic,
infrastructural, and environmental factors.
Using the Portuguese Classification of Professions, we construct an indicator to
estimate teleworking potential, which serves as a dependent variable in spatial
regression models incorporating major related factors. This approach enables an in-
depth analysis of how digital transition dynamics manifest unevenly across territories.
The results highlight that while certain variables exert widespread influence, others
display significant local variations, underscoring the heterogeneous territorial impacts
of digitalization on mobility and accessibility.
By addressing the data scarcity challenge and providing a replicable analytical
framework, this research offers valuable insights for policymakers navigating the digital
transition’s implications for mobility and regional development. Understanding these
spatial patterns is key to mitigating emerging territorial inequalities and ensuring that
digitalization fosters inclusive and sustainable regional transformation.

Milad Malekzadeh, Tuomas Väisänen (p), Anastasia Panori, Olle Järv

Fernando de la Torre Cuevas

Regional attractiveness plays a crucial role in shaping spatial mobility, economic development, and population dynamics across Europe. Traditional approaches to measuring attractiveness rely on static indicators such as GDP, infrastructure, and amenities, providing an estimate of potential desirability rather than observed attractiveness. This study introduces a behaviorally grounded approach by analyzing realized mobility flows across European NUTS2 regions, incorporating seven distinct types of mobility: permanent migration, long-term and short-term student mobility, seasonal work, long-distance commuting, cross-border commuting, and multilocal living. By leveraging multiple data sources, including Labour Force Survey records, Erasmus mobility data, and Twitter-derived movement patterns, we quantify net migration using two complementary methods: an aggregate normalized net migration index and a Principal Component Analysis (PCA)-based attractiveness index. Our findings consistently highlight urban centers as highly attractive while revealing regional anomalies, particularly in Nordic areas where non-permanent mobility forms, such as seasonal work and multilocal living, dominate. The results underscore the limitations of potential-based attractiveness measures in capturing real-world mobility trends. While potential attractiveness provides insights into a region’s structural appeal, realized attractiveness—measured through actual mobility—offers a more dynamic and policy-relevant perspective. These findings have critical implications for regional policymakers, emphasizing the need to integrate mobility data into regional attractiveness assessments. Relying solely on potential indicators can misrepresent a region’s true ability to attract people, leading to ineffective policy decisions. By incorporating diverse mobility types, this study provides a robust framework for assessing regional attractiveness and supports a more comprehensive understanding of mobility-driven regional development strategies in Europe.

Fernando de la Torre Cuevas (p), Bart Los

Tuomas Väisänen

The rise of working from home (WFH) is arguably one of the most notable effects derived from the digital transition. Whether WFH arrangements correlates with urban sprawl remains an open question, let alone if this relationship holds universally across space. In this paper, we aim to study which features make non-urban areas attractive enough for remote workers to move in, while keeping their jobs in the cities. We conjecture that with WFH agreements individuals are more likely to work in a city and live in a non-urban area. But we also hypothesise that not all non-urban places are as attractive for remote workers. Using individual census data from a selection of European Union (EU) countries, we estimate a multinomial regression model relating individual residential-job location choices to the probability of WFH arrangements. Local amenities are our key control variable. We combine individual census data from a selection of European countries with Eurostat’s skill-occupation matrices that allow us to circumvent data scarcity on WFH agreements. As a result, we provide a test on whether the contribution of WFH arrangements to urban sprawl is spatially invariant. We also identify which amenities correlate with the attractiveness of places for workers choosing WFH arrangements.

Tuomas Väisänen (p), Milad Malekzadeh, Oula Inkeröinen, Maija Havusela, Olle Järv

Luca Alfieri

Student mobility is a distinct form of human movement. It can indicate the characteristics and attractiveness of regions, which is relevant for governance, policy, and planning. In Europe, the Erasmus+ programme has facilitated the mobility of over 16 million students since its inception, and is a key instrument in supporting academic exchange of ideas in Europe and also in building a shared European identity for its participants. While Covid-19 impacted Erasmus+ mobility, drastically reducing the number of mobile students, whether the pandemic changed the regional structure of the Erasmus+ student mobility network and which regional characteristics play a key role in attracting students remain underexplored.

In this presentation, we present our analysis of how Covid-19 affected regional student mobility within Europe using the spatially enriched Erasmus+ student mobility data, containing the regional mobility of over 2 million individuals between 2014 and 2022. We analyse the differences between the years statistically and found interesting patterns in the regional characteristics which were associated with gaining and losing exchange students after Covid-19. Our preliminary results show how mobility is recovering to pre-pandemic levels, changes have occurred in the hierarchy of sending and receiving countries. Furthermore, our findings suggest some general patterns in terms of regional characteristics hold, such as how higher GDP, life expectancy, urbanization rate, and warmer climate tend to attract more students overall, whereas lower employment rate and higher median age tend to push students to have exchanges. Our findings have implications for regional planning for regions that want to increase their share of incoming and outgoing students.