Confronta i metodi

	Flow Mapping Analysis	Desire Line Analysis
Campo	Human Geography	Human Geography
Famiglia	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Anno di origine	1987	1955
Ideatore	Flow cartography tradition (computer migration mapping by Waldo Tobler)	Transportation planning tradition (urban transportation studies)
Tipo	Cartographic technique for visualizing movement between origins and destinations	Mapping and analysis of origin–destination travel demand as straight flow lines
Fonte seminale	Tobler, W. (1987). Experiments in migration mapping by computer. The American Cartographer, 14(2), 155–163.	Boyce, D. E., & Williams, H. C. W. L. (2015). Forecasting Urban Travel: Past, Present and Future. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham. ISBN: 9781848440319
Alias	Flow Map, Origin-Destination Mapping, Movement Mapping, Flow Cartography	Desire Line Mapping, OD Flow Line Analysis, Travel Desire Lines, Desire Path Flow Analysis
Correlati	4	4
Sintesi	Flow mapping analysis visualizes movement between places — migrants, commuters, trade, traffic — by drawing the flows of an origin-destination matrix as lines on a map, with line width scaled to the volume moving along each link. It is the cartography of interaction: where choropleths show what is in a place, flow maps show what travels between places, and the central challenge is to reveal the dominant patterns of movement without the map dissolving into an unreadable tangle of crossing lines. The technique was put on a computational footing by Waldo Tobler's 1987 experiments in computer migration mapping, and modern methods add edge bundling, smoothing, and statistical filtering to manage visual complexity.	Desire line analysis reveals the underlying demand for travel between places by drawing straight lines that connect each origin to each destination, with line width or weight proportional to the volume of flow between them. The term comes from transportation planning, where a 'desire line' represents the direct, idealized path a traveller would take if no network constrained them — capturing where people want to go, not how the roads make them go. Aggregating trips into an origin–destination matrix and rendering it as weighted lines exposes the dominant corridors of movement, making desire lines a foundational tool for visualizing and analysing travel demand.