Where Urban Youth Work and Live: A Data-Driven Approach to Identify Urban Functional Areas at a Fine Scale

Abstract

As a major labor force of cities, young people provide a huge driving force for urban innovation and development, and contribute to urban industrial upgrading and restructuring. In addition, with the acceleration of urbanization in China, the young floating population has increased rapidly, causing over-urbanization and creating certain social problems. It is important to analyze the demand of urban youth and promote their social integration. With the development of the mobile Internet and the improvement of the city express system, ordering food delivery has become a popular and convenient way to dine, especially in China. Food delivery data have a significant user attribute where the ages of most delivery customers are under 35 years old. In this paper, we introduce food delivery data as a new data source in urban functional zone detection and propose a time-series-based clustering approach to discover the urban hotspot areas of young people. The work and living areas were effectively identified according to the human behavioral characteristics of ordering food delivery. Furthermore, we analyzed the relationship between young people and the industry structure of Hangzhou and discovered that the geographical distribution of the identified work areas was similar to that of the Internet and e-commerce companies. The characteristics of the identified living areas were also analyzed in combination with the distribution of subway lines and residential communities, and it was found that the living areas were mainly distributed along subway lines and that urban villages appeared in the living hotspot regions, indicating that transportation and living cost were two important factors in the choice of residential location for young people. The findings of this paper can help urban industrial and residential planning and young population management.