Exploring the Associations Between Urban Form and Neighborhood Vibrancy: A Case Study of Chengdu, China

Abstract

The design and optimization of urban form has always been a hot topic in urban planning and development research. Besides, the creation of continuous vitality in urban areas is of critical importance in the development of urbanization. However, due to the lack of data, it is difficult to measure the effects of urban form on neighborhood vibrancy. Additionally, no uniform conclusion has been drawn regarding to what degree urban form can contribute to neighborhood vibrancy. Taking advantage of emerging new data sources, the depth and breadth of related research can now be improved. Therefore, this paper uses high-precision positioning social media check-in data to approximate the vibrancy of 658 neighborhoods, and uses a geographical information system (GIS) to quantitatively measure the urban form indicators in the central area of Chengdu City, China. A quantitative exploration and analysis of the relationships between neighborhood vibrancy and urban form is conducted. The results of three regression models considering different explanatory variables show that socio-economic factors account for approximately 23% of neighborhood vibrancy. In addition, the correlation between the shape characteristics of a neighborhood and the vibrancy is weak. However, when the inner urban form indicators of neighborhoods are introduced into the regression model, the goodness of fit (R2) is nearly doubled. This finding indicates that strong associations exist between urban form and neighborhood vibrancy. Specifically, building density and functional diversity are positively correlated with neighborhood vibrancy. Unlike existing studies, this study finds that the road network within the neighborhood plays a positive role in the creation of neighborhood vibrancy. However, the impact of a road density indicator is not as powerful as the impacts of building density and functional diversity. This research can help urban designers to better design urban environments.

An Evaluation of Street Dynamic Vitality and Its Influential Factors Based on Multi-Source Big Data

“…Guided by people-oriented and harmonious living concepts, Chinese urbanization has transformed from scale development to connotative growth [2]. Urban vitality plays an important role in meeting people's demands for high-quality living, and promoting urbanization connotative development [3]. Jacobs first proposed "urban vitality" as the intensity of human activity in city space, which is characterized by people conducting abundant activities and the urban space providing a favorable environment for activities [4].…”

Urban Vibrancy: An Emerging Factor that Spatially Influences the Real Estate Market

“…The interest in evaluating urban vibrancy has been progressively increased and different factors have been used to quantitatively measure it. Some recent studies, according to the definition of vibrancy by Jacobs [1,2], have analyzed people's activities at different locations and times by using social media check-in data [5,11] or numbers of mobile phone users [6] in a 24-h period as a proxy of urban vibrancy.…”

“…POI data were also used by Wu et al [5] and Lu et al [11]. Wu et al [5] investigated the quantitative relationship between land-use patterns and the vibrancy spatio-temporal distribution features by integrating kernel density estimation (KDE), geographically and temporally weighted regression (GTWR), and the Herfindahl-Hirschman index (HHI).…”

“…Their results showed that vibrancy evolution is influenced by several factors that are heterogeneous over time and space, and that the degree of clustering of POIs has a significant influence on housing prices. Lu et al [11] performed three regression models to analyze the relationship between neighborhood vibrancy and urban form and demonstrated that building density and functional diversity are positively correlated with neighborhood vibrancy.…”

Spatial Characterization of Urban Vitality and the Association With Various Street Network Metrics From the Multi-Scalar Perspective

“…The association between urban form metrics and urban vitality has been widely recognized in the literature ( 19 ). Empirical studies of both developed and developing countries have examined the inherent vital nature in urban areas and provided different conceptualizations of urban vitality in various territorial contexts.…”