Dynamics on territorial networks: planning productive regional districts

We study the patterns of the communities of workers and students in the italian insular regions, by applying grouping methodologies based on the characterization of the commuter's movements as a complex weighted network. In order the get the community structure we apply an algorithm based on the maximization of the weighted modularity that allows us to detect productive, geographically located, basins at different scales and composed by towns and their territories showing a certain degree of similarity. We confront these resulting distributions of communities with relevant historical and provincial boundaries, investigate on their discrepancies and correspondences, and propose possible perspectives for local policy making and planning. The main result of this study is that the emerging community structure revealed by the network grouping algorithm matches with the actual administrative boundaries.