Validating activity, time, and space diversity as essential components of urban vitality

Abstract

Urbanization’s rapid progress presents an urgent challenge for developing a predictive, quantitative theory of “the death and life of cities” (a.k.a. “the essential diversity conditions for the urban built environment”). Despite the importance of activity diversity (i.e. serving different primary functions), existing works ignored that time diversity (i.e. attracting people at different times of the day) and space diversity (i.e. attracting people from different districts) also play important roles in promoting urban life in large cities. With assistance of human mobility and crowdsourcing data, this article thoroughly validates whether activity, time, and space diversity are essential and inseparable components of urban vitality in the Wuhan, China context. To achieve the goal, point of interest (POI) data are utilized to quantitatively measure activity diversity, human mobility data are adopted for building quantitative metrics of time diversity and space diversity, and a detailed urban perception map is crowdsourced as ground truth data for establishing a regression model between urban diversity indicators and urban vitality. The resultant regression model succeeds to decouple the relationship between population concentration, activity diversity, time diversity, space diversity, and urban vitality. It confirms that activity diversity together with time diversity and space diversity has stronger association with urban vitality than any single diversity indicator. Our contributions are threefold: (a) we provided a comprehensive collection of metrics for measuring urban diversity, (b) we confirmed that activity, time, and space diversity are essential components of urban vitality, and (3) our methodology can be replicated at scale to understand urban vitality under various geographic, societal, and economic contexts due to easy accessibility of similar datasets.

The Relationship between Urban Vibrancy and Built Environment: An Empirical Study from an Emerging City in an Arid Region

“…Cellular signaling data, social media check-in data, smart-card records, and bike-sharing and taxi trajectory data are needed to estimate population distribution and mobility more accurately. Additionally, limited by our research framework, we did not consider time diversity, although studies have shown that time diversity has a strong association with urban vibrancy [ 21 ]. Future studies should strengthen the collection and acquisition of long-term continuous data to dynamically monitor and assess the relationship between the built environment and urban vibrancy.…”

“…Through recent advances in ICT (information and communication technology) and spatial orientation technologies, especially location-based service technologies, lifestyles have been undergoing great changes, and massive amounts of microscale spatiotemporal geographical open data are now available. Various spatiotemporally tagged data, including cellular signaling data, social media check-in data, point-of-interest (POI) data, smart-card records, taxi trajectory data, SCB data, and street view data, have been widely used in urban planning, population prediction [ 26 , 27 ], socioeconomic development [ 28 , 29 ], and urban vibrancy research [ 21 ], and even to infer individual personality [ 30 ]. Meanwhile, this new data environment provides the possibility of capturing human activities, rhythms, and preferences on a massive scale [ 31 ], enabling us to portray and quantify vibrancy much more easily and more accurately.…”

“…Wanshu Wu et al confirmed that mixed land use, diversity, scale, old buildings, density and border vacuums are all connected to the vibrancy of Chinese high-density urban areas [ 12 ]. Chaogui Kang et al found that activity, time, and space diversity are essential components of urban vibrancy [ 21 ]. Ye et al reported that building typology and density are connected with significant positive effects on urban vibrancy [ 9 ].…”

“…Furthermore, there are huge differences in urban development across China, as different cities have indeterminate development stages and different construction situations, and the conclusions of an urban vibrancy evaluation might therefore be inconsistent [ 11 ]. Most recent studies of Chinese urban vibrancy have focused mainly on the developed and highly urbanized regions in eastern China, such as Shanghai [ 12 ], Shenzhen [ 7 , 9 ] and Wuhan [ 21 ]. Little attention has been paid to cities of the less developed interior regions in northwestern China, where the urbanization level is increasing rapidly; these areas have great development potential and urban renewal demand.…”

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

“…Wu and Niu [2] have verified the influence of the built environment on UV using mobile phone location data in Shanghai, China. Furthermore, Kang, et al [12] studied the influence of activity, time, and space diversity on UV and concluded that the three together significantly impact UV.…”