A New Urban Vitality Analysis and Evaluation Framework Based on Human Activity Modeling Using Multi-Source Big Data

Abstract

A quantitative study of urban vitality brings new insights for evaluating the external construction environment and internal development power of cities. However, it still has limited knowledge of the relations between people’s diverse urban life and urban vitality, although urban activities are often used as the proxy for urban vitality. This paper aims to deeply mine the content of urban social life and reveal the driving mechanism of urban vitality after inspecting human activities. We propose a general framework for exploring the spatial pattern and driving mechanism of urban vitality using multi-source big data. It builds a mapping relationship between various urban activities and urban vitality aspects, including economic and social. In addition, the physical environment (static) and human–land interaction (dynamic) indicators are designed to analyze the driving mechanism of urban vitality using the Geographically Weighted Regression model. The results show that the spatial pattern and driving factors of urban vitality are heterogeneous over space regarding both the economic and social aspects of our experimental study. This work provides us with multiple perspectives to understand the connotation of urban vitality and urges us to develop rational strategies to make the city more vital, coordinated, and sustainable.

How Did Built Environment Affect Urban Vitality in Urban Waterfronts? A Case Study in Nanjing Reach of Yangtze River

“…For DPTS, a strong negative effect can be observed in the central regions (Hexi and Jiangbei), demonstrating that these regions have more convenient public transport, and then higher urban vitality. A study by Liu et al [71] also showed that traffic access and land use mix have strong positive correlations with urban vitality in the central area rather than peripheral area. Besides, our findings suggest that the DS has positive associations with urban vitality in urban waterfronts, especially in the central regions (Hexi and Jiangbei), demonstrating that the more proximity to the shoreline, the lower urban vitality.…”

A New Insight into Understanding Urban Vitality: A Case Study in the Chengdu-Chongqing Area Twin-City Economic Circle, China

“…To explore the spatial pattern and driving mechanism of UV, a conceptual framework has been proposed by [19], in which big data (e.g., internet sharing data and geospatial data) and the GWR (geographically weighted regression) are integrated. Consistent with the GMUV in this paper, high environment quality, manifested by things such as high road density, has a strong effect on economic vitality.…”

“…From the physical environment, the road density contributes greatly to the EnV, and further to UV. High road density indicates a good accessibility to public space, which is conducive to gatherings of people and promoting EcV and SV [19]. The study area (200,000 km 2 ) covers 140 districts and counties, among which most of them have low road density which has limited the communication between people, capital, and information.…”

“…With regard to economy-society interaction, the positive correlation between EcV and SV is significant (see Figure 7). The areas with high UV have been characterized by sufficient job opportunities and affordable consumption [19]. This implies high employment rate and strong business enthusiasm.…”

“…It is certain that these theoretical findings have laid a solid foundation for understanding vitality. However, there is a lack of consensus on both the definition of vitality [16,17] and of quantitative studies concerning the GMUV from a macroscopic level [3,18], although a few scholars have explored the driving mechanism of vitality [19,20]. In practice, the demand for urban space increases with the growing economy, which has motivated an increasing number of scholars to begin to study the role of vitality in urban planning and urban space design [21,22].…”