The METROmosaic project is funded under the 2021 Call “Social and Human Sciences Research for a Changing Society” of the CARIPLO Foundation and is part of the strategic objective “Demographic challenges: experimenting with new responses for a changing society“.

The METROmosaic project has a duration of 30 months and involves 4 research units: CNR-IRPPS, Politecnico di Milano (PI Alessandro Coppola), Sapienza University of Rome and University of Milano-Bicocca.

METROmosaic aims to explore the main current and emerging drivers and patterns of household residential mobility and their complex impacts on diversity, inequality, and socio-spatial cohesion at various scales and in a variety of local contexts within the urban regions of Milan and Rome.

METROmosaic intends to bridge a knowledge gap regarding the phenomenon of residential mobility—or intra-urban mobility—by allowing for:

(i) reconstructing a framework of the phenomenon’s evolution over the last twenty years in the urban areas of Rome and Milan;
(ii) investigating the drivers of residential choices at macro, meso, and micro levels;
(iii) studying the social and demographic effects of residential mobility at the local level;
(iv) considering future scenarios of residential mobility, also in light of the pandemic’s effects on household settlement attitudes.
These aspects are analyzed by considering elements that characterize “metropolitan mosaics” in different urban regions, such as differences in residential mobility patterns and determinants dictated by ethnicity.

The CNR-IRPPS research unit is specifically engaged in the following activities:

– systematic review of the literature on the topic of “intra-urban residential mobility”;
– collection, organization, and harmonization of stock and flow registry databases related to the urban regions of Rome and Milan;
– analysis and identification of settlement and residential mobility patterns in the two urban regions;
– definition of a taxonomy of neighborhoods/municipalities in the two urban regions based on residential mobility trends and the socioeconomic characteristics of the areas;
– planning and organization of a survey on the motivations for residential mobility among residents in the two urban regions;
– planning, organization, and implementation of a qualitative study on the decision-making processes of the population with a migratory background in Rome.