Urban Attractors: Discovering Patterns in Regions of Attraction in Cities

Abstract

Understanding the dynamics by which urban areas attract visitors is significant for urban development in cities. In addition, identifying services that relate to highly attractive districts is useful to make policies regarding the placement of such places. Thus, we present a framework for classifying districts in cities by their attractiveness to visitors, and relating Points of Interests (POIs) types to districts' attraction patterns. We used Origin-Destination matrices (ODs) mined from cell phone data that capture the flow of trips between each pair of places in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. We define the attraction profile for a place based on three main statistical features: The amount of visitors a place received, the distribution of distance traveled by visitors on the road network, and the spatial spread of where visitors come from. We use a hierarchical clustering algorithm to classify all places in the city by their features of attraction. We detect three types of Urban Attractors in Riyadh during the morning period: Global which are significant places in the city, Downtown which the central business district and Residential attractors. In addition, we uncover what makes these places different in terms of attraction patterns. We used a statistical significance testing approach to rigorously quantify the relationship between Points of Interests (POIs) types (services) and the 3 patterns of Urban Attractors we detected. The proposed framework can be used for detecting the attraction patterns given by type of services related to each pattern. This is a critical piece of information to inform trip distribution models.

Identifying urban attraction factors of Ho Chi Minh city

“…This study additionally identified attraction patterns by analyzing visitor numbers, visitor distance distribution, and visitor origin spatial dispersion. Nevertheless, the aforementioned methodology may introduce imprecision when attempting to identify urban attractions due to the restricted capability of identifying sites of interest in situations involving traffic congestion caused by visitors traversing the street network [19]. In addition, specific attractiveness factors have not yet been identified in this research.…”

“…A study examining the appeal of a city through the lens of tourism or staycations was conducted. Urban attractions were conventionally identified by Alhazzani [19] via the notion of road network sites of interest. This study additionally identified attraction patterns by analyzing visitor numbers, visitor distance distribution, and visitor origin spatial dispersion.…”