Francisco Rowe [@fcorowe]¹, Alessia Calafiore [@alel_domi ]¹, Dani Arribas-Bel [@darribas ]^1,2, Krasen Samardzhiev¹, Martin Fleischmann[@martinfleis ]¹

¹ Geographic Data Science Lab, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, United Kingdom. ² The Alan Turing Institute, British Library, 96 Euston Road, London, England, NW1 2DB, United Kingdom.

This repository stores the required code to replicate the results of the following article:

Rowe, F., Calafiore, A., Arribas-Bel, D., Samardzhiev, K., Fleischmann, M. 2022. Urban Exodus? Understanding Human Mobility in Britain During the COVID-19 Pandemic Using Facebook Data.

This paper aims to analyse the extent and durability of changes in human mobility patterns across the rural-urban continuum in Britain during the COVID-19 pandemic, covering an 18-month period from March 2020 to August 2021. Specifically this paper seeks to address the following set of questions:

• To what extent have people moved away from cities, and redistributed across the urban-rural continuum during the pandemic?
• What have been the key interactions between places across the population density hierarchy? Have people mainly moved to sparely populated areas?
• To what extent the intensity of population movement from cities have been sustained throughout the pandemic? Have the observed changes been temporary, or are likely to persist post pandemic?