Center for Spatial Studies

Where do people go when they have nowhere to be? Nonobligate activities are a significant part of our social and cultural lives, but there are no existing large scale data which characterize spatial variability in population allocation for these activities. As large scale population estimates have ever-finer resolutions, gaps in our ability to estimate this population segment have an increasingly large impact on high resolution population estimates. In this paper, we demonstrate an improved method for estimating the spatial allocation of the non-obligate population - people who are not at work, school, or in another residential institution. This method builds upon on anonymized and aggregate data on visits to public places, allocating the non-obligate population proportionally to worker population while accounting for the estimated ratio of visitors to workers in public places.