Core-periphery disparity in community vitality in Chongqing, China: Nonlinear explanation based on mobile phone data and multi-scale factors

Community vitality is essential to human health and quality of life through promoting various human activities. However, many Chinese cities witnessed declining vitality during massive suburbanization. Exploring community vitality is an effective way to measure the attractiveness and cohesion of community development towards better governance and planning design. However, extant literature overlooks the disparity in community vitality between core areas and periphery and corresponding driving factors. Therefore, we examined the core-periphery disparity of community vitality in Chongqing based on mobile phone signaling data and explored the nonlinear effects of multi-scale factors using Machine Learning models. Results indicated that Chongqing has concentrated high vitality in core areas but dispersed low vitality in the periphery. We found that neighborhood-level factors (e.g., land use mixture) are prominent in influencing cores' vitality, while community-level factors (e.g., building density) are critical in fostering peripheral vitality. Inner sky view indexes exhibit a negative-to-positive effect on vitality in the cores. Higher road intersection density promotes vitality in the periphery when exceeding a certain threshold. The relative importance of proximity to the (sub)centers and parks varied between daytime and nighttime. We call for targeted measures to enhance community vitality within effective ranges.