Location-based service information, provided by social networks, provides new data sources and perspectives to research tourism activities, especially in highly populated mega-cities. Based on three years (2012–2014) of approximately 340,000 check-in records collected from Sina micro-blog at 86 tourist attractions in Shenzhen, a first-tier city in southern China, we conducted a comprehensive study of the attraction features involving different aspects, such as tourist source, duration of stay, check-in activity index, and attraction correlation degree. The results showed that (1) theme parks established in the early 1990s were the most popular tourist attractions in Shenzhen, but a negative trend was detected in the check-in population; (2) compared with check-in times from surrounding activities and the kernel density of tourists, most destinations in Shenzhen showed a lack of attraction, failing to make the most of their geographic accessibility; and (3) the homogeneity and inconvenient traffic conditions of major tourist destinations leading to the construction of a tourism tour chain has become a challenge. The results of this study demonstrate the potential of big-data mining and provide valuable insights into tourism market design and management in mega-cities.

The concepts of space and time have dramatically changed with the development of modern sciences, such as geometry, physics, and astronomy. This radical shift also changes every aspect of our perspectives, including those on urban space and urban planning. With a brief introduction to the evolution of geometry, this article discusses the development of the way we think about and evaluate urban space. Such development is divided into two phases: homogeneous urban space and generalized non-Euclidean urban space, each with corresponding patterns of urban planning. Some key issues in the non-Euclidean pattern of planning are then explored intensively, such as varied measurements of urban land, geodesics in the city, and urban planning in spacetime. While emphasizing the way of thinking in urban planning process, this article provides some proposals that differ from those related to absolute space.