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Understanding territory organization, for example in terms of employment, home location and mobility, is crucial for the implementation of policy measures. In France, the National Statistics Office (INSEE) produces a zoning (ZAUER: Urban Area and Rural Employment Area’s Zoning) to identify the geographical extent of cities’ influence over their environment at the national level. Producing this typology is a complex task. It involves multiple actors and methods, and many arbitrary thresholds have to be chosen. As a consequence a zoning is characterized by long delays between consecutive updates. Recently, mobile phone data has shown promising results for land use classification as they provide for disaggregated, geo-localized and timely information on activity patterns of large shares of populations. In this paper, we exploit a dataset of hourly mobile phone activity profiles collected at each antenna by the French operator Orange to investigate the capabilities of mobile phone data to reproduce the French Urban Area Zoning.