Revealing deep semantic commercial patterns: Insights from urban landscape depiction

Abstract

Commercial functions play a significant role in economic growth and sustainable development. Influenced by socioeconomic changes which were investigated based on commercial behaviours using big geo-data, urban environment shows polycentric structures and further leads to more complex commercial landscapes. Thus, research considered environmental consequences of urban growth to better understand the commercialization process. However, only general commercial areas or certain commercial retail locations were investigated with the effects of urban environmental landscapes in existing studies. The decomposition of the commercial patterns such as accommodation and catering functions remains undiscussed. To fill this gap, this paper proposes a framework to decompose commercial patterns based on insight from different urban landscapes. First, we depict urban landscapes using spatial metrics, including the density of points of interest (POIs), percentage of landscape of buildings, landscape shape index of buildings and density of roads. Then, we examine the spatial distribution of the decomposed commercial patterns by delineating potential deep semantic topics. Finally, a structural equation model is utilised to determine the relations among urban landscapes and commercial patterns. The results show that four types of urban landscapes exhibit different spatial patterns, revealing various perspectives of commercial characteristics. Meanwhile, the decomposed commercial patterns, including those for catering and accommodation functions, display a heterogeneous distribution. These commercial patterns are directly affected by various configurations of buildings, POIs and roads. On this basis, suggestions are offered to improve commercial pattern development, including integrating urban landscape construction, organising the commercial pattern distribution and enhancing the harmony between the urban environment and commercial land uses.