Relationship between urban diversity and urban vitality is imperative for guiding better design in urban development, although existing frameworks are not able to efficiently examine the relationship at multiple scales. In this article, we propose a new framework to integrate nighttime light (NTL) imagery and multisource urban data into multiscale geographically weighted regression (MGWR) models to examine the varying relationship between diversity and vitality across space and time. NTL is used as a proxy for urban nighttime vitality. Public transport, taxi transit, and points of interest data are used to derive three aspects of urban diversity indices: ridership diversity, spatial interaction diversity, and built environment diversity. By comparing the models in holiday and nonholiday weeks in Shenzhen, China, the NTL-based vitality proxy was found to be strongly correlated with the urban diversity indices, given by the satisfactory goodness of fit ( r -squared = 0.9) of the MGWR models. The spatially varying relationships between diversity indices and nighttime vitality were observed and patterns discussed. The analysis of the coefficients revealed the importance of stable public transport and fluctuating taxi trips for nighttime vitality. The new index proposed for the diversity of spatial interaction (DSI) is a strong indicator for nighttime vitality, adding to existing vitality indicators. Furthermore, this study found that DSI and density of catering have less temporal variation, indicating their robustness in measuring nighttime vitality. This study provided empirical insights into how nighttime vitality is related to urban diversity, demonstrating new applications of NTL for intracity studies.

Public transport plays an important role in developing sustainable cities. A better understanding of how different public transit modes (bus, metro, and taxi) interact with each other will provide better sustainable strategies to transport and urban planners. However, most existing studies are either limited to small-scale surveys or focused on the identification of general interaction patterns during times of regular traffic. Transient demographic changes in a city (i.e., many people moving out and in) can lead to significant changes in such interaction patterns and provide a useful context for better investigating the changes in these patterns. Despite that, little has been done to explore how such interaction patterns change and how they are linked to the built environment from the perspective of transient demographic changes using urban big data. In this paper, the tap-in-tap-out smart card data of bus/metro and taxi GPS trajectory data before and after the Chinese Spring Festival in Shenzhen, China, are used to explore such interaction patterns. A time-series clustering method and an elasticity change index (ECI) are adopted to detect the changing transit mode patterns and the underlying dynamics. The findings indicate that the interactions between different transit modes vary over space and time and are competitive or complementary in different parts of the city. Both ordinary least-squares (OLS) and geographically weighted regression (GWR) models with built environment variables are used to reveal the impact of changes in different transit modes on ECIs and their linkage with the built environment. The results of this study will contribute to the planning and design of multi-modal transport services.

Spatial morphology of 2D space has been well studied at the scales of building, community, and city in space syntax literature. Space syntax decomposes continuous geographic space into a set of unique axial lines and represents them as a spatial network to analyze spatial morphology. However, 3D spatial morphology remains largely unexplored, partially due to limited data access and methodological constraints. Motivated by the multilayered network literature in network science, this work extends the conventional 2D space syntax axial network into a multilayered axial network to explore the spatial morphology of a university campus. Scaling properties are discovered from several aspects of the constructed spatial network (e.g., degree, local integration). The relationship between spatial morphology and route-based pedestrian flow is evaluated using a large Wi-Fi log dataset and multiple regression analysis. We found a significant correlation between the two, with a correlation coefficient of 0.756 and r² of 0.571. Four network features (i.e., local depth, geometric length, eigenvector, and betweenness), are found to significantly shape the pedestrian flow. The results of community detection show the effectiveness of multilayered space syntax analysis in depicting functional areas of campus, despite the complex nature of 3D space. Whilst a limitation of this research is the need to account for the 3D angular route preferences when characterizing the morphology of campus and the flow estimated based on the shortest routes using the Dijkstra algorithm.

A city is a complex system that never sleeps; it constantly changes, and its internal mobility (people, vehicles, goods, information, etc.) continues to accelerate and intensify. These changes and mobility vary in terms of the attributes of the city, such as space, time and cultural affiliation, which characterise to some extent how the city functions. Traditional urban studies have successfully modelled the ‘low-frequency city’ and have provided solutions such as urban planning and highway design for long-term urban development. Nevertheless, the existing urban studies and theories are insufficient to model the dynamics of a city’s intense mobility and rapid changes, so they cannot tackle short-term urban problems such as traffic congestion, real-time transport scheduling and resource management. The advent of information and communication technology and big data presents opportunities to model cities with unprecedented resolution. Since 2018, a paradigm shift from modelling the ‘low-frequency city’ to the so-called ‘high-frequency city’ has been introduced, but hardly any research investigated methods to estimate a city’s frequency. This work aims to propose a framework for the identification and analysis of indicators to model and better understand the concept of a high-frequency city in a systematic manner. The methodology for this work was based on a content analysis-based review, taking into account specific criteria to ensure the selection of indicator sets that are consistent with the concept of the frequency of cities. Twenty-two indicators in five groups were selected as indicators for a high-frequency city, and a framework was proposed to assess frequency at both the intra-city and inter-city levels. This work would serve as a pilot study to further illuminate the ways that urban policy and operations can be adjusted to improve the quality of city life in the context of a smart city.