  A major issue for policy makers and planners is the definition of the "ideal"
regional partition, i.e. the delimitation of sub-regional domains showing a
sufficient level of homogeneity with respect to some specific territorial
features. In Sardinia, the second major island in the Mediterranean sea,
politicians and analysts have been involved in a 50 year process of
identification of the correct pattern for the province, an intermediate
administrative body in between the Regional and the municipal administration.
In this paper, we compare some intermediate body partitions of Sardinia with
the patterns of the communities of workers and students, by applying grouping
methodologies based on the characterization of Sardinian commuters' system as a
complex weighted network. We adopt an algorithm based on the maximization of
the weighted modularity of this network to detect productive basins composed by
municipalities showing a certain degree of cohesiveness in terms of commuter
flows. The results obtained lead to conclude that new provinces in Sardinia
seem to have been designed -even unconsciously- as labour basins of
municipalities with similar commuting behaviour.
