The Spatial Patterns of Service Facilities Based on Internet Big Data: A Case Study on Chengdu

In the context of the mid-late development of China’s urbanization, promoting sustainable urban development and giving full play to urban potential have become a social focus, which is of enormous practical significance for the study of urban spatial pattern. Based on such Internet data as a map’s Point of Interest (POI), this paper studies the spatial distribution pattern and clustering characteristics of POIs of four categories of service facilities in Chengdu of Sichuan Province, including catering, shopping, transportation, scientific, educational, and cultural services, by means of spatial data mining technologies such as dimensional autocorrelation analysis and DBSCAN clustering. Global spatial autocorrelation is used to study the correlation between an index of a certain element and itself (univariate) or another index of an adjacent element (bivariate); partial spatial autocorrelation is used to identify characteristics of spatial clustering or spatial anomaly distribution of geographical elements. DBSCAN (Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise) is able to detect clusters of any shape without prior knowledge. The final step is to carry out quantitative analysis and reveal the distribution characteristics and coupling effects of spatial patterns. According to the results, (1) the spatial distribution of POIs of all service facilities is significantly polarized, as they are concentrated in the old city, and the trend of suburbanization is indistinctive, showing three characteristics, namely, central driving, traffic accessibility, and dependence on population activity; (2) the spatial distribution of POIs of the four categories of service facilities is featured by the pattern of “one center, multiple clusters,” where “one center” mainly covers the area within the first ring road and partial region between the first ring road and the third ring road, while “multiple clusters” are mainly distributed in the well-developed areas in the second circle of Chengdu, such as Wenjiang District and Shuangliu District; and (3) there is a significant correlation between any two categories of POIs. Highly mixed multifunctional areas are mainly distributed in the urban center, while service industry is less aggregated in urban fringe areas, and most of them are single-functional or dual-functional regions.