Crowd activity is an important indicator of commercial streets’ attractiveness and developmental potential. The development of positioning technologies such as GPS and mobile signal tracking has provided a large amount of trajectory data for studying crowd activities on commercial streets. These data can not only be used for the statistics, extraction, and visualization of crowd information, but they also facilitate the exploration of deeper insights into dynamic behaviors, choices, trajectories, and other details of crowd activities. Based on this, this article proposes a new framework for analyzing crowd activities to explore the spatial activity patterns of crowds and understand the dynamic spatial needs of people by analyzing their correlations with local formats. Specifically, we analyze the spatial activity characteristics of a crowd in the Lao Men Dong Commercial Street area by identifying the stay points and trajectory clusters of the crowd, and we establish a regression analysis model by selecting commercial street format variables to evaluate their impact on crowd activities. Through case analysis of the Lao Men Dong Commercial Street, this study confirms that our method is feasible and suitable for spatial research at different scales, thereby providing relevant ideas for format location selection, spatial layout, and other planning types, and for promoting the sustainable development of urban spaces.

Analyses of urban hierarchy and scale distribution are crucial in urban research, as they examine the laws of urban development and the functional layout of urban spatial systems. However, previous studies have focused on the macro-spatial distribution of the economy, businesses, and population at the regional level, whereas systematic research on the scale distribution of retail formats in central urban areas is lacking. Therefore, this study investigated the hierarchical scale distribution of retail formats in the top ten cities in China by GDP, using the Public Service Facilities Index Method to define central district boundaries, using scale as an epistemological framework of order and analyzing the spatial distribution patterns of retail formats. The results revealed that the spatial hierarchical scale follows a power law within a certain range; the spatial distribution exhibits stage characteristics, providing a quantitative method for defining retail centres; and the dominant functions, development directions, and morphological characteristics of central districts influence the hierarchical scale distribution of retail formats.