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

Xin Guo,Hongfei Chen,Xiping Yang

doi:10.3390/ijgi10030143

Abstract

Urban vitality is an important indicator of urban development capacity. Streets’ metrics can depict intro-urban fabrics and physiognomy in detail, and thus street vitality affected by street metrics is a concrete manifestation of urban vitality. However, few studies have evaluated dynamic vitality or explored how it is influenced by land use. To bridge this gap, we fully evaluated street dynamic vitality and explored how to enhance the street dynamic vitality by changing the distribution and combination of land use. Specifically, we examined the street dynamic vitality and land use diversity in the main urban zone of Xining city in China using mobile communication and point of interest data, adopted optimized K-means clustering to identify street dynamic vitality types, evaluated the classification result based on vitality intensity and vitality stability, and explored the link between land use and dynamic vitality. Since vitality intensity limitations were found in describing street dynamic vitality, it was necessary to introduce vitality stability. We also found a positive correlation between the vitality intensity and land use density, there were outstanding traffic facilities in high-intensity vitality streets, and improving the abundance and uniformity of land use was beneficial to increase vitality stability. Overall, describing street vitality from a dynamic perspective can improve resource utilization efficiency and rationally plan layouts.

Highlights

The world has ushered in the “urban era” where the proportion of urban population rising sharply to exceed that of the rural population [1]
We adopted the optimized K-means to classify the street vitality types according to the similarity of their dynamic vitality and evaluated the classification results by the dynamic vitality evaluation system formed by the vitality intensity and vitality stability
The results fund that the temporal characteristics of street vitality were consistent with human activities: in the main urban area of Xining city, the daytime street vitality was higher than that of the night-time, the daytime street vitality was lower on weekends than on weekdays, and night-time street vitality was higher on weekends

Summary

Introduction

The world has ushered in the “urban era” where the proportion of urban population rising sharply to exceed that of the rural population [1]. Nobel Laureate in Economics, stated that: “The high-tech development in the United. States and China’s urbanization will be two key factors affecting the process of human society development in the 21st century.”. 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]. As the basic unit of public and living spaces [5], street metrics—including geometry, neighboring block connectivity, and vegetation—have proved effective in discriminating urban typologies in intro-urban structures and morphologies [6,7]. Street characteristics are the microscopic embodiment of urban fabrics and physiognomy, and street vitality affected by street properties is a concrete manifestation of urban vitality

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion