Portraying the Influence Factor of Urban Vibrancy at Street Level Using Multisource Urban Data

Abstract

Exploring the factors influencing urban vibrancy can help policy development and advance urban planning and sustainable development. Previous studies have typically focused on the effects of physical environmental factors (e.g., built environment, urban landscape) on urban vibrancy, ignoring the role of non-physical environmental factors (e.g., urban psychological perceptions). In addition, these studies remain focused on relatively coarse spatial units and lack the exploration of finer-grained spatial structures. In this study, a novel framework is proposed to analyze urban vibrancy and its influencing factors at a more fine-grained street level. Firstly, two types of urban sensing data, POIs and Weibo check-ins, are integrated to portray the spatial distribution patterns of urban vibrancy on the streets. Secondly, a full convolutional network (FCN-8s) is used to segment the streetscape images of Beijing and use them as a basis to extract potential visual–spatial features and urban psychological perceptual features that influence urban vibrancy. Thirdly, we reveal the deeper causes of the impact of psychological perception on urban vibrancy. Finally, an improved ridge regression model is proposed to model the relationship between features and vibrancy, reducing the covariance between features while avoiding the reduction of important features. Satisfactory regression model performances were attained with adjusted R2 values of 0.706, 0.743, and 0.807 at each characteristic level. The results of the study show that: Urban vibrancy is highly dependent on the proposed visual–spatial and urban psychological perception characteristics at the street level. In particular, positive urban psychological perceptions (safety, lively, wealthy) are positively correlated with urban vibrancy, while negative street perceptions (boring) are negatively correlated with urban vibrancy. Unlike previous research scales, our study shows that urban vibrancy portrayal based on the street scale has a greater potential to demonstrate fine-grained vibrancy distribution compared to the neighborhood scale. These findings may provide important insights for people-oriented urban development and planning.